PD Non Fiction April 2019

PD NON-FICTION
APRIL 2019

HAIL, VERNAL EQUINOX!,
by Robert C. Benchley
ARISTOPHANES' THE BIRDS,

by William L. Collins

THE SOCIALIST PARTY AND THE WORKING CLASS,

by Eugene V. Debs

WHEN I KNEW STEPHEN CRANE,

by Willa Cather

SOME CURIOUS VERSIONS OF SHAKESPEARE, by

Frederick W. Kilbourne

KEPLER,

by Anonymous

FIRST VICTORY OF THE AMERICAN NAVY,

by Alexander Mackenzie

LITERARY PUZZLES,

by Matt Pierard

THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL OF DANCING,

by Daniel G. Mason

HYPOCRITE, MADMAN, FOOL, AND KNAVE,

by Paul L. MacKendrick

WERE INDIANS AFRAID OF YELLOWSTONE?,

by Merrill Dee Beal

JUNE 24,1938 FIRESIDE CHAT,

by Franklin D. Roosevelt

ON TEACHING ONE'S GRANDMOTHER HOW TO SUCK EGGS,

by Louise Imogen Guiney

HAIL, VERNAL EQUINOX!

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Of All Tilings, by Robert C. Benchley

If all that I hear is true, a great deal has been written, first and
last, about that season which we slangily call "Spring"; but I don't
remember ever having seen it done in really first-class form;—that
is, in such a way that it left something with you to think over,
something that you could put your finger on and say, "There, _there_
is a Big, Vital Thought that I can carry away with me to my room."

What Spring really needs is a regular press-agent sort of write-up,
something with the Punch in it, an article that will make people sit
up and say to themselves, "By George, there must be something in this
Spring stuff, after all."

What sort of popularity did Education have until correspondence
schools and encyclopedias began to give publicity to it in their
advertisements? Where would Music be to-day if it were not for the
exhortations of the talking-machine and mechanical-piano companies
telling, through their advertising-copy writers, of the spiritual
exaltation that comes from a love of music? These things were all
right in their way before the press-agent took hold of them, but they
never could have hoped to reach their present position without him.

Of course, all this has just been leading up to the point I want to
make,—that something more ought to be written about Spring. When you
consider that every one, including myself, agrees that _nothing_ more
should be written about it, I think that I have done rather well to
prove as much as I have so far. And, having got this deep into the
thing, I can't very well draw back now.

Well then. Spring is a great season. Nobody will gainsay me that.

Without it, we should crash right from Winter into Summer with no
chance to shift to light-weight underwear. I could write a whole piece
about that phase of it alone, and, if I were pressed for things to
say, I myself could enlarge on it now, making up imaginary
conversation of people who have been caught in balbriggans by the
first sweltering day of summer. But I have so many more things to say
about Spring that I can't stop to bother with deadwood like that. Such
literary fillerbusting should be left to those who are not so full of
their subject as I am.

In preparing for this article, I thought it best to look up a little
on the technical side of Spring, about which so little is known, at

least by me. And, would you believe it, the Encyclopedia Britannica,
which claims in its advertisements not only to make its readers
presidents of the Boards of Directors of any companies they may
select, but also shows how easy it would be for Grandpa or Little Edna
to carry the whole set about from room to room, if, by any possible
chance they should ever want to, this same Encyclopedia Britannica
makes no reference to Spring, except incidentally, along with Bed
Springs and Bubbling Springs.

This slight of one of our most popular seasons is probably due to the
fact that Spring is not exclusively a British product and was not
invented by a Briton. Had Spring been fortunate enough to have had the
Second Earl of Stropshire-Stropshire-Stropshire as one of its
founders, the Britannica could probably have seen its way clear to
give it a five-page article, signed by the Curator of the Jade
Department in the British Museum, and illustrated with colored plates,
showing the effect of Spring on the vertical and transverse sections
of the stamen of the South African Euphorbiceae.

I was what you might, but probably wouldn't, call stunned at not
finding anything about the Season of Love in the encyclopedia, for
without that assistance what sort of a scientific article could I do
on the subject? I am not good at improvising as I go along, especially
in astronomical matters. But we Americans are not so easily thwarted.
Quick as a wink I looked up "Equinox."

There is a renewed agitation of late to abolish Latin from our
curricula. Had I not known my Latin I never could have figured out
what "equinox" meant, and this article would never have been written.
Take that, Mr. Flexner!

While finding "equinox," however, I came across the word
"equilibrium," which is the word before you come to "equinox," and I
became quite absorbed in what it had to say on the matter. There were
a great many things stated there that I had never dreamed before, even
in my wildest vagaries on the subject of equilibrium. For instance,
did you know that if you cover the head of a bird, "as in hooding a
falcon" (do you remember the good old days when you used to run away
from school to hood falcons?) the bird is deprived of the power of
voluntary movement? Just think of that, deprived of the power of
voluntary movement simply because its head is covered!

And, as if this were not enough, it says that the same thing holds
true of a fish! If you should ever, on account of a personal grudge,
want to get the better of a fish, just sneak up to him on some

pretext or other and suddenly cover its eyes with a cloth, and there
you have it, helpless and unable to move. You may then insult it, and
it can do nothing but tremble with rage.

It is little practical things like this that you pick up in reading a
good reference book, things that you would never get in ten years at
college.

For instance, take the word "equites," which follows "equinox" in the
encyclopedia. What do you know about equites, Mr. Businessman? Of
course, you remember in a vague way that they were Roman horsemen or
something, but, in the broader sense of the word, could you have told
that the term "equites" came, in the time of Gaius Gracchus, to mean
any one who had four hundred thousand sesterces? No, I thought not.
And yet that is a point which is apt to come up any day at the office.

A customer from St. Paul might come in and, of course, you would take
him out to lunch, hoping to land a big order. Where would you be if
his hobby should happen to be "equites "? And if he should come out in
the middle of the conversation with "By the way, do you remember how
many sesterces it was necessary to have during the administration of
Gaius Gracchus in order to belong to the Equites?" if you could snap
right back at him with "Four hundred thousand, I believe," the order
would be assured. And if, in addition, you could volunteer the
information that an excellent account of the family life of the
Equites could be found in Mommsen's "_Romisches Staatsrecht_," Vol. 3,
your customer would probably not only sign up for a ten-year contract,
but would insist on paying for the lunch.

But, of course, this has practically nothing to do with Spring, or, as
the boys call it, the "vernal equinox." The vernal equinox is a
serious matter. In fact, I think I may say without violating any
confidence, that it is the initial point from which the right
ascensions and the longitudes of the heavenly bodies are measured.

This statement will probably bring down a storm of ridicule on my
head, but look at how Fulton was ridiculed.

In fact, I might go even further and say that the way to seek out
Spring is not to trail along with the poets and essayists into the
woods and fields and stand about in the mud until a half-clothed bird
comes out and peeps. If you really want to be in on the official
advent of Spring, you may sit in a nice warm observatory and, entirely
free from head-colds, proceed with the following simple course:

Take first the conception of a fictitious point which we shall call,

for fun, the Mean Equinox. This Mean Equinox moves at a nearly uniform

rate, slowly varying from century to century.

Now here comes the trick of the thing. The Mean Equinox is merely a
decoy, and, once you have determined it, you shift suddenly to the
True Equinox which you can tell, according to Professor A.M. Clerk's
treatise on the subject, because it moves around the Mean Equinox in a
period equal to that of the moon's nodes. Now all you have to do is to
find out what the moon's nodes are (isn't it funny that you can be as
familiar with an object as you are with the moon and see it almost
every night, and yet never know that it has even one node, not to
mention nodes?) and then find out how fast they move. This done and
you have discovered the Vernal Equinox, or Spring, and without
spilling a dactyl.

How much simpler this is than the old, romantic way of determining
when Spring had come! A poet has to depend on his intuition for
information, and, on the subject of Spring's arrival, intuition may be
led astray by any number of things. You may be sitting over one of
those radiators which are concealed under window-seats, for instance,
and before you are aware of it feel what you take to be the first
flush of Spring creeping over you. It would be obviously premature to
go out and write a poem on Youth and Love and Young Onions on the
strength of that.

I once heard of a young man who in November discovered that he had an
intellectual attachment for a certain young woman and felt that
married life with her would be without doubt a success. But he could
never work himself up into sufficient emotional enthusiasm to present
the proposition to her in phrases that he knew she had been accustomed
to receive from other suitors. He knew that she wouldn't respond to a
proposal of marriage couched in terms of a real estate transaction.

Yet such were the only ones that he felt himself capable of at the
moment under the prevailing weather conditions. So, knowing something
of biology, he packed his little bag and rented an alcove in a nearby
green-house, where he basked in the intensified sun-warmth and odor of
young tube roses, until with a cry, he smashed the glass which
separated him from his heart's desire and tore around the corner to
her house, dashing in the back door and flinging himself at her feet
as she was whipping some cream, and there poured forth such a torrent
of ardent sentiments that there was really nothing that the poor girl
could do but marry him that afternoon.

In fact, if you want to speak astronomically (some people do), you may
define Spring even more definitely. Since we are all here together,
and good friends, let us take the center of the earth as origin, and,

once we have done this, the most natural fundamental axis is,
obviously, the earth's rotation. The fundamental plane perpendicular
to it is the plane of the equator. That goes without saying.

Now, here we go! Coordinates referred to in this system are termed
equatorial, and I think that you will agree with me that nothing could
be fairer than that. Very well, then. Since this is so, we may define
Spring by the following geometric representation in which the angle
ZOP, made by the radius vector with the fundamental plane, shows a
springlike tendency.

This drawing we may truthfully entitle "Spring," and while it hasn't
perhaps the color found in Botticelli's painting of the same name, yet
it just as truthfully represents Spring in these parts as do the
unstable sort of ladies in the more famous picture.

I only wish that I had more space in which to tell what my heart is
full of in connection with this subject. I really have only just
begun.

THE BIRDS.

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Aristophanes, by William Lucas Collins

'The Birds' of Aristophanes, though one of the longest of his comedies,
and one which evidently stood high in the estimation of the author
himself, has comparatively little interest for a modern reader. Either
the burlesque reads to us, as most modern burlesques assuredly would,
comparatively poor and spiritless without the important adjuncts of
music, scenery, dresses, and what we call the "spectacle" generally,
which we know to have been in this instance on the most magnificent
scale; or the points in the satire are so entirely Athenian, and
directed to the passing topics of the day, that the wit of the allusions
is now lost to us. Probably there is also a deeper political meaning
under what appears otherwise a mere fantastical trifling; and this is
the opinion of some of the best modern critics. It may be, as Silvern
thinks, that the great Sicilian expedition, and the ambitious project of
Alcibiades for extending the Athenian empire, form the real point of the
play; easily enough apprehended by contemporaries, but become obscure
to us. This is no place to discuss a question upon which even professed
scholars are not agreed; but all these causes may contribute to make us
incompetent judges of the effect of the play upon those who saw it
acted. It failed, however, to secure the first prize that year: the

author was again beaten by Ameipsias—a specimen of whose comedies one
would much like to see.

Two citizens of Athens, Peisthetaerus and Euelpides—names which we may,
perhaps, imperfectly translate into "Plausible" and "Hopeful"—disgusted
at the state of things in Athens both politically and socially, have set
out in search of some hitherto undiscovered country where there shall be
no lawsuits and no informers. They have hired as guides a raven and a
jackdaw—who give a good deal of trouble on the road by biting and
scratching—and are at last led by them to the palace of the King of the
Birds, formerly King Tereus of Thrace, but changed, according to the
mythologists, into the Hoopoe, whose magnificent crest is a very fit
emblem of his royalty. His wife is Procne—"the Nightingale"—daughter
of a mythical king of Attica, so that, in fact, he may be considered as
a national kinsman. The royal porter, the Trochilus, is not very willing
to admit the visitors, looking upon them as no better than a couple of
bird-catchers; but the Bird-king himself receives them, when informed of
their errand, with great courtesy, though he does not see how he can
help them. But can they possibly want a finer city than Athens? No—but
some place more quiet and comfortable. But why, he asks, should they
apply to him?

"Because you were a man, the same as us;

And found yourself in debt, the same as us;

And did not like to pay, the same as us;

And after that you changed into a bird,

And ever since have flown and wandered far
Over the land and seas, and have acquired
All knowledge that a bird or man can learn."—(F.)

The adventurers do not learn much, however, from the Hoopoe. But an
original idea strikes Peisthetaerus—why not build a city up here, in the
region of the Birds, the mid atmosphere between earth and heaven? If the
Hoopoe and his subjects will but follow his advice, they will thus hold
the balance of power in the universe.

"From that position you'll command mankind,

And keep them in utter thorough subjugation,—

Just as you do the grasshoppers and locusts;

And if the gods offend you, you'll blockade them,

And starve them to surrender."—(F.)

The king summons a public meeting of his subjects to consider the
proposal of their human visitors; and no doubt the appearance of the
Chorus in their grotesque masks and elaborate costumes, representing

twenty-four birds of various species, from the flamingo to the
woodpecker, would be hailed with great delight by an Athenian audience,
who in these matters were very much like grown-up children. The music
appears to have been of a very original character, and more elaborate
than usual; and the part of the Nightingale, with solos on the flute
behind the scenes, is said to have been taken by a female performer of
great ability, a public favourite who had just returned to Athens after
a long absence. But the mere words of a comic extravaganza, whether
Greek or English, without the accompaniments, on which so much depends,
are little better than the dry skeleton of the piece, and can convey but
a very inadequate idea of its attractions when fittingly "mounted" on
the stage. This is notably the case with this production of our author,
which, from its whole character, must have depended very much upon the
completeness of such accessories for its success.

The Birds are at first inclined to receive their human visitors as
hereditary and notorious enemies. "Men were deceivers ever," is their
song, in so many words; and it requires all the king's influence to keep
them from attacking them and killing them at once. At length they agree
to a parley, and Peisthetaerus begins by paying some ingenious
compliments to the high respectability and antiquity of the feathered
race. Was not the cock once king of the Persians? is he not still called
the "Persian bird"? and still even to this day, the moment he crows, do
not all men everywhere jump out of bed and go to their work? And was not
the cuckoo king of Egypt; and still when they hear him cry "cuckoo!" do
not all the Egyptians go into the harvest-fields? Do not kings bear
eagles and doves now on their sceptres, in token of the true sovereignty
of the Birds? Is not Jupiter represented always with his eagle, Minerva
with her owl, Apollo with his hawk? But now,—he goes on to say—"men
hunt you, and trap you, and set you out for sale, and, not content
with, simply roasting you, they actually pour scalding sauce over
you,—oil, and vinegar, and grated cheese,—spoiling your naturally
exquisite flavour." But, if they will be advised by him, they will bear
it no longer. If men will still prefer the gods to the birds, then let
the rooks and sparrows flock down and eat up all the seed-wheat—and let
foolish mortals see what Ceres can then do for them in the way of
supplies. And let the crows peck out the eyes of the sheep and oxen; and
let them see whether Apollo (who calls himself a physician, and takes
care to get his fees as such) will be able to heal them. [Euelpides here
puts in a word—he hopes they will allow him first to sell a pair of
oxen he has at home.] And indeed the Birds will make much better gods,
and more economical: there will be no need of costly marble temples, and
expensive journeys to such places as Ammon and Delphi; an oak-tree or an
olive-grove will answer all purposes of bird-worship.

He then propounds his great scheme for building a bird-city in mid-air.

The idea is favourably entertained, and the two featherless bipeds are
equipped (by means of some potent herb known to the Bird-king) with a
pair of wings apiece, to make them presentable in society, before they
are introduced at the royal table. The metamorphosis causes some
amusement, and the two human travellers are not complimentary as to each
other's appearance in these new appendages; Peisthetaerus declaring that
his friend reminds him of nothing so much as "a goose on a cheap
sign-board," while the other retorts by comparing him to "a plucked
blackbird." [45]

The Choral song that follows is one of the gems of that elegance of
fancy and diction which, here and there, in the plays of Aristophanes,
almost startle us by contrast with the broad farce which forms their
staple, and show that the author possessed the powers of a true poet as
well as of a clever satirist.

"Ye children of man! whose life is a span,

Protracted with sorrow from day to day.

Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous.

Sickly calamitous creatures of clay!

Attend to the words of the sovereign birds,

Immortal, illustrious lords of the air,

Who survey from on high, with a merciful eye.

Your struggles of misery, labour, and care.

Whence you may learn and clearly discern
Such truths as attract your inquisitive turn;

Which is busied of late with a mighty debate,

A profound speculation about the creation.

And organical life, and chaotical strife.

With various notions of heavenly motions.

And rivers and oceans, and valleys and mountains,

And sources of fountains, and meteors on high.

And stars in the sky.... We propose by-and-by
(If you'll listen and hear) to make it all clear."—(F.)

There follows here some fantastical cosmogony, showing how all things
had their origin from a mystic egg, laid by Night, from which sprang the
golden-winged Eros—Love, the great principle of life, whose offspring
were the Birds.

"Our antiquity proved, it remains to be shown
That Love is our author and master alone;

Like him we can ramble and gambol and fly
O'er ocean and earth, and aloft to the sky:

And all the world over, we're friends to the lover,

And where other means fail, we are found to prevail,

When a peacock or pheasant is sent as a present.

All lessons of primary daily concern
You have learnt from the birds, and continue to learn,

Your best benefactors and early instructors;

We give you the warning of seasons returning;

When the cranes are arranged, and muster afloat
In the middle air, with a creaking note.

Steering away to the Lybian sands.

Then careful farmers sow their lands;

The crazy vessel is hauled ashore.

The sail, the ropes, the rudder, and oar
Are all unshipped, and housed in store.

The shepherd is warned, by the kite reappearing,

To muster his flock, and be ready for shearing.

You quit your old cloak at the swallow's behest,

In assurance of summer, and purchase a vest.

For Delphi, for Ammon, Dodona, in fine
For every oracular temple and shrine.

The birds are a substitute equal and fair,

For on us you depend, and to us you repair
For counsel and aid when a marriage is made,

A purchase, a bargain, a venture in trade:

Unlucky or lucky, whatever has struck ye—

An ox or an ass that may happen to pass,

A voice in the street, or a slave that you meet,

A name or a word by chance overheard—

If you deem it an omen, you call it a Jbird,_j
And if birds are your omens, it clearly will follow
That birds are a proper prophetic Apollo."—(F.)

The Birds proceed at once to build their new city. Peisthetaerus prefers
helping with his head rather than his hands, but he orders off his
simple-minded companion to assist them in the work.

_Peis._ Come now, go aloft, my boy, and tend the masons;

Find them good stones; strip to it, like a man,

And mix the mortar; carry up the hod—

And tumble down the ladder, for a change.

Set guards over the wall; take care of fire;

Go your rounds with the bell as city watchman—

And go to sleep on your post—as I know you will.

_Euelp._ (_sulkily_). And you stay here and be hanged,

if you like—there, now!

_Peis._ (_winking at the King_). Go! there's a good
fellow, go! upon my word,

They couldn't possibly get on without you.

The building is completed, by the joint exertions of the Birds, in a
shorter time than even the enthusiastic speculations of Peisthetaerus had
calculated:—

"_Messenger._ There came a body of thirty thousand cranes
(I won't be positive, there might be more)

With stones from Africa in their craws and gizzards,

Which the stone-curlews and stone-chatterers
Worked into shape and finished. The sand-martins
And mudlarks too were busy in their department.

Mixing the mortar; while the water-birds,

As fast as it was wanted, brought the water,

To temper and work it.

_Peis._ (_in a fidget_). But who served the masons?

Who did you get to carry it?

_Mess._ To carry it?

Of course the _carrion_ crows and carrier-pigeons." [46]—(F.)

The geese with their flat feet trod the mortar, and the pelicans with
their saw-bills were the carpenters. The name fixed upon for this new
metropolis is "Cloud-Cuckoo-Town"—the first recorded "castle in the
air." It must be the place, Euelpides thinks, where some of those great
estates he which he has heard certain friends of his in Athens boast
of. It appears to be indeed a very unsubstantial kind of settlement; for
Iris, the messenger of the Immortals, who has been despatched from
heaven to inquire after the arrears of sacrifice, quite unaware of its
existence and its purpose, dashes through the airy blockade immediately
after its building. She is pursued, however, by a detachment of light
cavalry—hawks, falcons, and eagles—and brought upon the stage as
prisoner, in a state of great wrath at the indignity put upon
her,—wrath which is by no means mollified by the sarcasms of
Peisthetaerus on the flaunting style and very pronounced colours of her
costume as goddess of the Rainbow.

The men seem well inclined to the new ruling powers, and many apply at
once to be furnished with wings. But the state of things in the
celestial regions soon gets so intolerable, owing to the stoppage of all

communication with earth and its good things, that certain barbarian
deities, the gods of Thrace, who are—as an Athenian audience would
readily understand—of a very carnal and ill-mannered type, break out
into open rebellion, and threaten mutiny against the supremacy of
Jupiter, unless he can come to some terms with this new intermediate
power. Information of this movement is brought by Prometheus—here, as
in the tragedians, the friend of man and the enemy of Jupiter—who comes
secretly to Peisthetaerus (getting under an umbrella, that Jupiter may
not see him) and advises him on no account to come to any terms with
that potentate which do not include the transfer into his possession of
the fair Basileia (sovereignty), who rules the household of Olympus, and
is the impersonation of all good things that can be desired. In due time
an embassy from the gods in general arrives at the new city, sent to
treat with the Birds. The Commissioners are three: Neptune, Hercules
(whose appetite for good things was notorious, and who would be a
principal sufferer by the cutting off the supplies), and a Thracian
god—a Triballian—who talks very bad Greek indeed, and who has
succeeded in some way in getting himself named on the embassy, to the
considerable disgust of Neptune, who has much trouble in making him look
at all respectable and presentable.

"_Nep._ There's Nephelococcugia! that's the town,

The point we're bound to with our embassy.

(_Turning to the Triballian._)

But you! what a figure have ye made yourself!

What a way to wear a mantle! slouching off
From the left shoulder! Hitch it round, I tell ye.

On the right side. For shame—come—so; that's better;

These folds, too, bundled up; there, throw them round
Even and easy,—so. Why, you're a savage,

A natural-born savage.—Oh, democracy!

What will it bring us to, when such a ruffian
Is voted into an embassy!

_Trib._ (_to Neptune, who is pulling his dress about_). Come, hands off,
Hands off!

_Nep._ Keep quiet, I tell ye, and hold your tongue.

For a very beast! in all my life in heaven,

I never saw such another. Hercules,

I say, what shall we do? What should you think?

_Her._ What would I do? what do I think? I've told you
Already—I think to throttle him—the fellow,

Whoever he is, that's keeping us blockaded.

_Nep._ Yes, my good friend; but we were sent, you know,

To treat for a peace. Our embassy is for peace.

_Her._ That makes no difference; or if it does.

It makes me long to throttle him all the more."—(F.)

Hercules, ravenous as he always is, and having been kept for some time
on very short commons, is won over by the rich odour of some cookery in
which he finds Peisthetaerus, now governor of the new state, employed on
their arrival. He is surprised to discover that the _roti_ consists of
birds, until it is explained to him that they are aristocrat birds, who
have, in modern phrase, been guilty of conspiring against democracy.

This brief but bitter satire upon this Bird-Utopia is thrown in as it
were by the way, quite casually; but one wonders how the audience
received it. Hercules determines to make peace on any terms; and when
Neptune seems inclined to stand upon the dignity of his order, and
taunts his brother god with being too ready to sacrifice his father's
rights, he draws the Triballian aside, and threatens him roundly with a
good thrashing if he does not give his vote the right way. Having
secured his majority of votes by this powerful argument—a kind of
argument by no means peculiar to aerial controversies, but familiar
alike to despots and demagogues in all times—Hercules concludes on
behalf of the gods the truce with the Birds. Jupiter agrees to resign
his sceptre to them, on condition that there is no further embargo on
the sacrifices, and to give up to Peisthetaerus the beautiful Basileia;
and in the closing scene she appears in person, decked as a bride,
riding in procession by the side of Peisthetaerus, while the Chorus chant
a half-burlesque epithalamium. "Plausible" has won the sovereignty, but
of a very unsubstantial kingdom—if that be the moral of the play.

Silvern contends, in his very ingenious Essay on this comedy, that the
fantastic project in which the Birds are persuaded by Peisthetaerus to
engage is intended to represent the ultimate designs of Alcibiades in
urging the expedition of the Athenians to Sicily,—no less than the
subjugation of Italy, Carthage, and Libya, and obtaining the sovereignty
of the Mediterranean: by which the Spartans (the gods of the comedy)
would be cut off from intercourse with the smaller states, here
represented by the men. He considers that in Peisthetaerus we have
Alcibiades, compounded with some traits of the sophist Gorgias, whose
pupil he is said to have been. Iris's threat of the wrath of her father
Jupiter—which certainly is more seriously worded than the general tone
of the play—he takes to be a prognostication of the unhappy termination
of the expedition, a feeling shared by many at Athens; while in the
transfer of Basileia—all the real power—to Peisthetaerus, and not to

the Birds, he foreshadows the probable results of the personal ambition
of Alcibiades. Such an explanation receives support from many other
passages in the comedy, and is worked out by the writer with great pains
and ability.

THE SOCIALIST PARTY AND THE WORKING CLASS

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, with
a Department of Appreciations, by Eugene Victor Debs

_Opening Speech Delivered as Candidate of the Socialist Party for
President, at Indianapolis, Ind., September 1,1904_

_Mr. Chairman, Citizens and Comrades:_

There has never been a free people, a civilized nation, a real republic
on this earth. Human society has always consisted of masters and slaves,
and the slaves have always been and are today, the foundation stones of
the social fabric.

Wage-labor is but a name; wage-slavery is the fact.

The twenty-five millions of wage-workers in the United States are
twenty-five millions of twentieth century slaves.

This is the plain meaning of what is known as

THE LABOR MARKET.

And the labor market follows the capitalist flag.

The most barbarous fact in all Christendom is the labor market. The mere
term sufficiently expresses the animalism of commercial civilization.

They who buy and they who sell in the labor market are alike dehumanized
by the inhuman traffic in the brains and blood and bones of human
beings.

The labor market is the foundation of so-called civilized society.

Without these shambles, without this commerce in human life, this
sacrifice of manhood and womanhood, this barter of babes, this sales of
souls, the capitalist civilizations of all lands and all climes would
crumble to ruin and perish from the earth.

Twenty-five millions of wage-slaves are bought and sold daily at
prevailing prices in the American Labor Market.

This is the

PARAMOUNT ISSUE
in the present national campaign.

Let me say at the very threshold of this discussion that the workers
have but the one issue in this campaign, the overthrow of the capitalist
system and the emancipation of the working class from wage-slavery.

The capitalists may have the tariff, finance, imperialism and other
dust-covered and moth-eaten issues entirely to themselves.

The rattle of these relics no longer deceives workingmen whose heads are
on their own shoulders.

They know by experience and observation that the gold standard, free
silver, fiat money, protective tariff, free trade, imperialism and
anti-imperialism all mean capitalist rule and wage-slavery.

Their eyes are open and they can see; their brains are in operation and
they can think.

The very moment a workingman begins to do his own thinking he
understands the paramount issue, parts company with the capitalist
politician and falls in line with his own class on the political
battlefield.

The political solidarity of the working class means the death of
despotism, the birth of freedom, the sunrise of civilization.

Having said this much by way of introduction I will now enter upon the
actualities of my theme.

THE CLASS STRUGGLE.

We are entering tonight upon a momentous campaign. The struggle for
political supremacy is not between political parties merely, as appears
upon the surface, but at bottom it is a life and death struggle between

two hostile economic classes, the one the capitalist, and the other the
working class.

The capitalist class is represented by the Republican, Democratic,

Populist and Prohibition parties, all of which stand for private
ownership of the means of production, and the triumph of any one of
which will mean continued wage-slavery to the working class.

As the Populist and Prohibition sections of the capitalist party
represent minority elements which propose to reform the capitalist
system without disturbing wage-slavery, a vain and impossible task, they
will be omitted from this discussion with all the credit due the rank
and file for their good intentions.

The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the
Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class
struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such
differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to
principles.

With either of these parties in power one thing is always certain and
that is that the capitalist class is in the saddle and the working class
under the saddle.

Under the administration of both these parties the means of production
are private property, production is carried forward for capitalist
profit purely, markets are glutted and industry paralyzed, workingmen
become tramps and criminals while injunctions, soldiers and riot guns
are brought into action to preserve "law and order" in the chaotic
carnival of capitalistic anarchy.

Deny it as may the cunning capitalists who are clearsighted enough to
perceive it, or ignore it as may the torpid workers who are too blind
and unthinking to see it, the struggle in which we are engaged today is
a class struggle, and as the toiling millions come to see and understand
it and rally to the political standard of their class, they will drive
all capitalist parties of whatever name into the same party, and the
class struggle will then be so clearly revealed that the hosts of labor
will find their true place in the conflict and strike the united and
decisive blow that will destroy slavery and achieve their full and final
emancipation.

In this struggle the workingmen and women and children are represented
by the Socialist party and it is my privilege to address you in the name
of that revolutionary and uncompromising party of the working class.

ATTITUDE OF THE WORKERS.

What shall be the attitude of the workers of the United States in the
present campaign? What part shall they take in it? What party and what
principles shall they support by their ballots? And why?

These are questions the importance of which are not sufficiently
recognized by workingmen or they would not be the prey of parasites and
the service tools of scheming politicians who use them only at election
time to renew their masters' lease of power and perpetuate their own
ignorance, poverty and shame.

In answering these questions I propose to be as frank and candid as
plain-meaning words will allow, for I have but one object in this
discussion and that object is not office, but the truth, and I shall
state it as I see it, if I have to stand alone.

But I shall not stand alone, for the party that has my allegiance and
may have my life, the Socialist party, the party of the working class,
the party of emancipation, is made up of men and women who know their
rights and scorn to compromise with their oppressors; who want no votes
that can be bought and no support under any false pretense whatsoever.

The Socialist party stands squarely upon its proletarian principles and
relies wholly upon the forces of industrial progress and the education
of the working class.

The Socialist party buys no votes and promises no offices. Not a
farthing is spent for whiskey or cigars. Every penny in the campaign
fund is the voluntary offerings of workers and their sympathizers and
every penny is used for education.

What other parties can say the same?

Ignorance alone stand in the way of socialist success. The capitalist
parties understand this and use their resources to prevent the workers
from seeing the light.

Intellectual darkness is essential to industrial slavery.

Capitalist parties stand for Slavery and Night.

The Socialist party is the herald of Freedom and Light.

Capitalist parties cunningly contrive to divide the workers upon dead
issues.

The Socialist party is uniting them upon the living issue:

Death to Wage Slavery!

When industrial slavery is as dead as the issues of the Siamese
capitalist parties the Socialist party will have fulfilled its mission
and enriched history.

And now to our questions:

First, all workingmen and women owe it to themselves, their class and
their country to take an active and intelligent interest in political
affairs.

THE BALLOT.

The ballot of united labor expresses the people's will and the people's
will is the supreme law of a free nation.

The ballot means that labor is no longer dumb, that at last it has a
voice, that it may be heard and if united shall be heeded.

Centuries of struggle and sacrifice were required to wrest this symbol
of freedom from the mailed clutch of tyranny and place it in the hand of
labor as the shield and lance of attack and defense.

The abuse and not the use of it is responsible for its evils.

The divided vote of labor is the abuse of the ballot and the penalty is
slavery and death.

The united vote of those who toil and have not will vanquish those who
have and toil not, and solve forever the problem of democracy.

THE HISTORIC STRUGGLE OL CLASSES.

Since the race was young there have been class struggles. In every state
of society, ancient and modern, labor has been exploited, degraded and
in subjection.

Civilization has done little for labor except to modify the forms of its
exploitation.

Labor has always been the mudsill of the social fabric — is so now and
will be until the class struggle ends in class extinction and free
society.

Society has always been and is now built upon exploitation—the
exploitation of a class — the working class, whether slaves, serfs or
wage-laborers, and the exploited working class in subjection have always
been, instinctively or consciously, in revolt against their oppressors.

Through all the centuries the enslaved toilers have moved slowly but
surely toward their final freedom.

The call of the Socialist party is to the exploited class, the workers
in all useful trades and professions, all honest occupations, from the
most menial service to the highest skill, to rally beneath their own
standard and put an end to the last of the barbarous class struggles by
conquering the capitalist government, taking possession of the means of
production and making them the common property of all, abolishing
wage-slavery and establishing the co-operative commonwealth.

The first step in this direction is to sever all relations with

CAPITALIST PARTIES.

They are precisely alike and I challenge their most discriminating
partisans to tell them apart in relation to labor.

The Republican and Democratic parties are alike capitalist
parties — differing only in being committed to different sets of
capitalist interests — they have the same principles under varying colors,
are equally corrupt and are one in their subservience to capital and
their hostility to labor.

The ignorant workingman who supports either of these parties forges his
own fetters and is the unconscious author of his own misery. He can and
must be made to see and think and act with his fellows in supporting the
party of his class and this work of education is the crowning virtue of
the socialist movement.

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.

Let us briefly consider the Republican party from the worker's
standpoint. It is capitalist to the core. It has not and can not have
the slightest interest in labor except to exploit it.

Why should a workingman support the Republican party?

Why should a millionaire support the Socialist party?

For precisely the same reason that all the millionaires are opposed to
the Socialist party, all the workers should be opposed to the Republican
party. It is a capitalist party, is loyal to capitalist interests and
entitled to the support of capitalist voters on election day.

All it has for workingmen is its "glorious past" and a "glad hand" when
it wants their votes.

The Republican party is now and has been for several years, in complete
control of government.

What has it done for labor? What has it not done for capital?

Not one of the crying abuses of capital has been curbed under Republican
rule.

Not one of the petitions of labor has been granted.

The eight hour and anti-injunction bills, upon which organized labor is
a unit, were again ruthlessly slain by the last congress in obedience to
the capitalist masters.

David M. Parry has greater influence at Washington than all the millions
of organized workers.

Read the national platform of the Republican party and see if there is
in all its bombast a crumb of comfort for labor. The convention that
adopted it was a capitalist convention and the only thought it had of
labor was how to abstract its vote without waking it up.

In the only reference it made to labor it had to speak easy so as to
avoid offense to the capitalists who own it and furnish the boodle to
keep it in power.

The labor platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties are

interchangeable and non-redeemable. They both favor "justice to capital
and justice to labor." This hoary old platitude is worse than
meaningless. It is false and misleading and so intended. Justice to
labor means that labor shall have what it produces. This leaves nothing
for capital.

Justice to labor means the end of capital.

The old parties intend nothing of the kind. It is false pretense and
false promise. It has served well in the past. Will it continue to catch
the votes of unthinking and deluded workers?

What workingmen had part in the Republican national convention or were
honored by it?

The grand coliseum swarmed with trust magnates, corporation barons,
money lords, stock gamblers, professional politicians, lawyers,
lobbyists and other plutocratic tools and mercenaries, but there was no
room for the horny-handed and horny-headed sons of toil. They built it,
but were not in it.

Compare that convention with the convention of the Socialist party,
composed almost wholly of working men and women and controlled wholly
the interest of their class.

But a party is still better known by its chosen representatives than by
its platform declarations.

Who are the nominees of the Republican party for the highest offices in
the gift of the nation and what is their relation to the working class?

First of all, Theodore Roosevelt and Charles W. Fairbanks, candidates
for President and Vice-President, respectively, deny the class struggle
and this almost infallibly fixes their status as friends of capital and
enemies of labor. They insist that they can serve both; but the fact is
obvious that only one can be served and that one at the expense of the
other. Mr. Roosevelt's whole political career proves it.

The capitalists made no mistake in nominating Mr. Roosevelt. They know
him well and he has served them well. They know that his instincts,
associations, tastes and desires are with them, that he is in fact one
of them and that he has nothing in common with the working class.

The only evidence to the contrary is his membership in the Brotherhood
of Locomotive Firemen which seems to have come to him co-incident with

his ambition to succeed himself in the presidential chair. He is a full
fledged member of the union, has the grip, signs and passwords; but it
is not reported that he is attending meetings, doing picket duty,
supporting strikes and boycotts and performing such other duties as his
union obligation imposes.

When Ex-President Grover Cleveland violated the constitution and
outraged justice by seizing the state of Illinois by the throat and
handcuffing her civil administration at the behest of the crime-stained
trusts and corporations, Theodore Roosevelt was among his most ardent
admirers and enthusiastic supporters. He wrote in hearty commendation of
the atrocious act, pronounced it most exalted patriotism and said he
would have done the same himself had he been president.

And so he would and so he will!

How impressive to see the Rough Rider embrace the Smooth Statesman!
Oyster Bay and Buzzard's Bay! "Two souls with but a single thought, two
hearts that beat as one."

There is also the highest authority for the statement charging Mr.

Roosevelt with declaring about the same time he was lauding Cleveland
that if he was in command he would have such as Altgeld, Debs and other
traitors lined up against a dead wall and shot. The brutal remark was
not for publication but found its way into print and Mr. Roosevelt,
after he became a candidate, attempted to make denial, but the words
themselves sound like Roosevelt and bear the impress of his savage
visage.

Following the Pullman strike in 1894 there was an indignant and emphatic
popular protest against "government by injunction," which has not yet by
any means subsided.

Organized labor was, and is, a unit against this insidious form of
judicial usurpation as a means of abrogating constitutional restraints
of despotic power.

Mr. Roosevelt with his usual zeal to serve the ruling class and keep
their slaves in subjection, vaulted into the arena and launched his
tirade upon the "mob" that dared oppose the divine rule of a corporation
judge.

"Men who object to what they style 'government by injunction,'" said he,
"are, as regards the essential principles of government, in hearty
sympathy with their remote skin-clad ancestors, who lived in caves.

fought one another with stone-headed axes and ate the mammoth and woolly
rhinoceros. They are dangerous whenever there is the least danger of
their making the principles of this ages-buried past living factors in
our present life. They are not in sympathy with men of good minds and
good civic morality."

In direct terms and plain words Mr. Roosevelt denounces all those who
oppose "Government by Injunction" as cannibals, barbarians and
anarchists, and this violent and sweeping stigma embraces the whole
organized movement of labor, every man, woman and child that wears the
badge of union labor in the United States.

It is not strange in the light of these facts that the national
congress, under President Roosevelt's administration, suppresses
anti-injunction and eight-hour bills and all other measures favored by
labor and resisted by capital.

No stronger or more convincing proof is required of Mr. Roosevelt's
allegiance to capital and opposition to labor, nor of the class struggle
and class rule which he so vehemently denies; and the workingman who in
the face of these words and acts, can still support Mr. Roosevelt, must
feel himself flattered in being publicly proclaimed a barbarian, and
sheer gratitude, doubtless, impels him to crown his benefactor with the
highest honors.

If the working class are barbarians, according to Mr. Roosevelt, this
may account for his esteeming himself as having the very qualities
necessary to make himself Chief of the Tribe.

But it must be noted that Mr. Roosevelt denounced organized labor as
savages long before he was a candidate for president. After he became a
candidate he joined the tribe and is today, himself, according to his
own dictum, a barbarian and the enemy of civic morality.

The labor union to which President Roosevelt belongs and which he is
solemnly obligated to support, is unanimously opposed to "Government by
Injunction." President Roosevelt knew it when he joined it and he also
knew that those who oppose injunction rule have the instincts of
cannibals and are a menace to morality, but his proud nature succumbed
to political ambition, and his ethical ideas vanished as he struck the
trail that led to the tribe and, after a most dramatic scene and
impressive ceremony, was decorated with the honorary badge of
international barbarism.

How Theodore Roosevelt, the trade-unionist, can support the presidential

candidate who denounced him as an immoral and dangerous barbarian, he
may decide at his leisure, and so may all other union men in the United
States who are branded with the same vulgar stigma, and their ballots
will determine if they have the manhood to resent insult and rebuke its
author, or if they have been fitly characterized and deserve humiliation
and contempt.

The appointment of Judge Taft to a cabinet position is corroborative
evidence, if any be required, of President Roosevelt's fervent faith in
Government by Injunction. Judge Taft first came into national notoriety
when, some years ago, sitting with Judge Ricks, who was later tried for
malfeasance, they issued the celebrated injunction during the Toledo,

Ann Arbor & North Michigan railroad strike that paralyzed the
Brotherhoods of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen and won for them the
gratitude and esteem of every corporation in the land. They were hauled
to Toledo, the headquarters of the railroad, in a special car, pulled by
a special engine, on special time, and after hastily consulting the
railroad magnates and receiving instructions, let go the judicial
lightning that shivered the unions to splinters and ended the strike in
total defeat. Judge Taft is a special favorite with the trust barons and
his elevation to the cabinet was ratified with joy at the court of St.

Plutus.

Still again did President Roosevelt drive home his arch-enmity to labor
and his implacable hostility to the trade-union movement when he made
Paul Morton, the notorious union hater and union wrecker, his secretary
of the navy. That appointment was an open insult to every trade-unionist
in the country and they who lack the self-respect to resent it at the
polls may wear the badge, but they are lacking wholly in the spirit and
principles of union labor.

Go ask the brotherhood men who were driven from the C. B. & Q. and the
striking union machinists on the Santa Fe to give you the pedigree of
Mr. Morton and you will learn that his hate for union men is equalled
only by his love for the scabs who take their places.

Such a man and such another as Sherman Bell, the military ferret of the
Colorado mine owners, are the ideal patriots and personal chums of Mr.
Roosevelt, and by honoring these he dishonors himself and should be
repudiated by the ballot of every working man in the nation.

Mr. Fairbanks, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, is a
corporation attorney of the first class and a plutocrat in good and
regular standing. He is in every respect a fit and proper representative
of his party and every millionaire in the land may safely support him.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.

In referring to the Democratic party in this discussion we may save time
by simply saying that since it was born again at the St. Louis
convention it is near enough like its Republican ally to pass for a twin
brother.

The former party of the "common people" is no longer under the boycott
of the plutocracy since it has adopted the Wall street label and
renounced its middle class heresies.

The radical and progressive element of the former Democracy have been
evicted and must seek other quarters. They were an unmitigated nuisance
in the conservative counsels of the old party. They were for the "common
people" and the trusts have no use for such a party.

Where but to the Socialist party can these progressive people turn? They
are now without a party and the only genuine Democratic party in the
field is the Socialist party, and every true Democrat should thank Wall
street for driving him out of a party that is democratic in name only
and into one that is democratic in fact.

The St. Louis convention was a trust jubilee. The Wall street
reorganizers made short work of the free silver element. From first to
last it was a capitalistic convocation. Labor was totally ignored. As an
incident, two thousand choice chairs were reserved for the Business
Men's League of St. Louis, an organization hostile to organized labor,
but not a chair was tendered to those whose labor had built the
convention hall, had clothed, transported, fed and wined the delegates
and whose votes are counted on as if they were so many dumb driven
cattle, to pull the ticket through in November.

As another incident, when Lieutenant Richmond Hobson dramatically
declared that President Cleveland had been the only president who had
ever been patriotic enough to use the federal troops to crush union
labor, the trust agents, lobbyists, tools and clackers screamed with
delight and the convention shook with applause.

The platform is precisely the same as the Republican platform in
relation to labor. It says nothing and means the same. A plank was
proposed condemning the outrages in Colorado under Republican
administration, but upon order from the Parryites it was promptly thrown
aside.

The editor of _American Industries^ organ of the Manufacturers'
Association, commented at length in its issue of July 15 on the triumph
of capital and the defeat of labor at both Republican and Democratic
national conventions. Among other things he said: "The two labor
lobbies, partly similar in make-up, were, to put it bluntly, thrown out
bodily in both places." And that is the simple fact and is known of all
men who read the papers. The capitalist organs exult because labor, to
use their own brutal expression, was kicked bodily out of both the
Republican and Democratic national conventions.

What more than this is needed to open the eyes of workingmen to the fact
that neither of these parties is their party and that they are as
strangely out of place in them as Rockefeller and Vanderbilt would be in
the Socialist party?

And how many more times are they to be "kicked out bodily" before they
stay out and join the party of their class in which labor is not only
honored but is supreme, a party that is clean, that has conscience and
convictions, a party that will one day sweep the old parties from the
field like chaff and issue the Proclamation of Labor's Emancipation?

Judge Alton B. Parker corresponds precisely to the Democratic platform.

It was made to order for him. His famous telegram in the expiring hour
removed the last wrinkle and left it a perfect fit.

Thomas W. Lawson, the Boston millionaire, charges that Senator Patrick
McCarren, who brought out Judge Parker for the nomination, is on the pay
roll of the Standard Oil Company as political master mechanic at twenty
thousand dollars a year, and that Parker is the chosen tool of Standard
Oil. Mr. Lawson offers Senator McCarren one hundred thousand dollars if
he will disprove the charge.

William Jennings Bryan denounced Judge Parker as a tool of Wall street
before he was nominated and declared that no self-respecting Democrat
could vote for him, and after his nomination he charged that it had been
dictated by the trusts and secured by "crooked and indefensible
methods." Mr. Bryan also said that labor had been betrayed in the
convention and need look for nothing from the Democratic party. He made
many other damaging charges against his party and its candidates, but
when the supreme test came he was not equal to it, and instead of
denouncing the betrayers of the "common people" and repudiating their
made-to-order Wall street program, he compromised with the pirates that
scuttled his ship and promised with his lips the support his heart
refused and his conscience condemned.

The Democratic nominee for President was one of the Supreme Judges of
the State of New York who declared the eight-hour law unconstitutional
and this is an index of his political character.

In his address accepting the nomination he makes but a single allusion
to labor and in this he takes occasion to say that labor is charged with
having recently used dynamite in destroying property and that the
perpetrators should be subjected to "the most rigorous punishment known
to the law." This cruel intimation amounts to conviction in advance of
trial and indicates clearly the trend of his capitalistically trained
judicial mind. He made no such reference to capital, nor to those
ermined rascals who use judicial dynamite in blowing up the constitution
while labor is looted and starved by capitalistic freebooters who
trample all law in the mire and leer and mock at their despoiled and
helpless victims.

It is hardly necessary to make more than passing reference to Henry G.
Davis, Democratic candidate for Vice-President. He is a coal baron,
railroad owner and, of course, an enemy to union labor. He has amassed a
great fortune exploiting his wage-slaves and has always strenuously
resisted every attempt to organize them for the betterment of their
condition. Mr. Davis is a staunch believer in the virtue of the
injunction as applied to union labor. As a young man he was in charge of
a slave plantation and his conviction is that wage-slaves should be kept
free from the contaminating influence of the labor agitator and render
cheerful obedience to their master.

Mr. Davis is as well qualified to serve his party as is Senator
Fairbanks to serve the Republican party and wage-workers should have no
trouble in making their choice between this pernicious pair of
plutocrats, and certainly no intelligent workingman will hesitate an
instant to discard them both and cast his vote for Ben Hanford, their
working class competitor, who is as loyally devoted to labor as
Fairbanks and Davis are to capital.

THE SOCIALIST PARTY.

In what has been said of other parties I have tried to show why they
should not be supported by the common people, least of all by
workingmen, and I think I have shown clearly enough that such workers as
do support them are guilty, consciously or unconsciously, of treason to
their class. They are voting into power the enemies of labor and are
morally responsible for the crimes thus perpetrated upon their

fellow-workers and sooner or later they will have to suffer the
consequences of their miserable acts.

The Socialist party is not, and does not pretend to be, a capitalist
party. It does not ask, nor does it expect the votes of the capitalist
class. Such capitalists as do support it do so seeing the approaching
doom of the capitalist system and with a full understanding that the
Socialist party is not a capitalist party, nor a middle class party, but
a revolutionary working class party, whose historic mission it is to
conquer capitalism on the political battle-field, take control of
government and through the public powers take possession of the means of
wealth production, abolish wage-slavery and emancipate all workers and
all humanity.

The people are as capable of achieving their industrial freedom as they
were to secure their political liberty, and both are necessary to a free
nation.

The capitalist system is no longer adapted to the needs of modern
society. It is outgrown and fetters the forces of progress. Industrial
and commercial competition are largely of the past. The handwriting
blazes on the wall. Centralization and combination are the modern forces
in industrial and commercial life. Competition is breaking down and
co-operation is supplanting it.

The hand tools of early times are used no more. Mammoth machines have
taken their places. A few thousand capitalists own them and many
millions of workingmen use them.

All the wealth the vast army of labor produces above its subsistence is
taken by the machine owning capitalists, who also own the land and the
mills, the factories, railroads and mines, the forests and fields and
all other means of production and transportation.

Hence wealth and poverty, millionaires and beggars, castles and caves,
luxury and squalor, painted parasites on the boulevard and painted
poverty among the red lights.

Hence strikes, boycotts, riots, murder, suicide, insanity, prostitution
on a fearful and increasing scale.

The capitalist parties can do nothing. They are a part, an iniquitous
part, of the foul and decaying system.

There is no remedy for the ravages of death.

Capitalism is dying and its extremities are already decomposing. The
blotches upon the surface show that the blood no longer circulates. The
time is near when the cadaver will have to be removed and the atmosphere
purified.

In contrast with the Republican and Democratic conventions, where
politicians were the puppets of plutocrats, the convention of the
Socialist party consisted of workingmen and women fresh from their
labors, strong, clean, wholesome, self-reliant, ready to do and dare for
the cause of labor, the cause of humanity.

Proud indeed am I to have, been chosen by such a body of men and women
to bear aloft the proletarian standard in this campaign, and heartily do
I endorse the clear and cogent platform of the party which appeals with
increasing force and eloquence to the whole working class of the
country.

To my associate upon the national ticket I give my hand with all my
heart. Ben Hanford typifies the working class and fitly represents the
historic mission and revolutionary character of the Socialist party.

CLOSING WORDS.

These are stirring days for living men. The day of crisis is drawing
near and Socialists are exerting all their power to prepare the people
for it.

The old order of society can survive but little longer. Socialism is
next in order. The swelling minority sounds warning of the impending
change. Soon that minority will be the majority and then will come the
co-operative commonwealth.

Every workingman should rally to the standard of his class and hasten
the full-orbed day of freedom.

Every progressive Democrat must find his way in our direction and if he
will but free himself from prejudice and study the principles of
Socialism he will soon be a sturdy supporter of our party.

Every sympathizer with labor, every friend of justice, every lover of
humanity should support the Socialist party as the only party that is
organized to abolish industrial slavery, the prolific source of the
giant evils that afflict the people.

Who with a heart in his breast can look upon Colorado without keenly
feeling the cruelties and crimes of capitalism! Repression will not help
her. Brutality will only brutalize her. Private ownership and
wage-slavery are the curse of Colorado. Only Socialism will save
Colorado and the nation.

The overthrow of capitalism is the object of the Socialist party. It
will not fuse with any other party and it would rather die than
compromise.

The Socialist party comprehends the magnitude of its task and has the
patience of preliminary defeat and the faith of ultimate victory.

The working class must be emancipated by the working class.

Woman must be given her true place in society by the working class.

Child labor must be abolished by the working class.

Society must be reconstructed by the working class.

The working class must be employed by the working class.

The fruits of labor must be enjoyed by the working class.

War, bloody war, must be ended by the working class.

These are the principles and objects of the Socialist party and we
fearlessly proclaim them to our fellowmen.

We know our cause is just and that it must prevail.

With faith and hope and courage we hold our heads erect and with
dauntless spirit marshal the working class for the march from Capitalism
to Socialism, from Slavery to Freedom, from Barbarism to Civilization.

WHEN I KNEW STEPHEN CRANE

The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays, by
Willa Cather

It was, I think, in the spring of '94 that a slender, narrow-chested
fellow in a shabby grey suit, with a soft felt hat pulled low over

his eyes, sauntered into the office of the managing editor of the
Nebraska State Journal and introduced himself as Stephen Crane. He
stated that he was going to Mexico to do some work for the Bacheller
Syndicate and get rid of his cough, and that he would be stopping in
Lincoln for a few days. Later he explained that he was out of money
and would be compelled to wait until he got a check from the East
before he went further. I was a Junior at the Nebraska State
University at the time, and was doing some work for the State
Journal in my leisure time, and I happened to be in the managing
editor's room when Mr. Crane introduced himself. I was just off the
range; I knew a little Greek and something about cattle and a good
horse when I saw one, and beyond horses and cattle I considered
nothing of vital importance except good stories and the people who
wrote them. This was the first man of letters I had ever met in the
flesh, and when the young man announced who he was, I dropped into a
chair behind the editor's desk where I could stare at him without
being too much in evidence.

Only a very youthful enthusiasm and a large propensity for hero
worship could have found anything impressive in the young man who
stood before the managing editor's desk. He was thin to emaciation,
his face was gaunt and unshaven, a thin dark moustache straggled on
his upper lip, his black hair grew low on his forehead and was
shaggy and unkempt. His grey clothes were much the worse for wear
and fitted him so badly it seemed unlikely he had ever been measured
for them. He wore a flannel shirt and a slovenly apology for a
necktie, and his shoes were dusty and worn gray about the toes and
were badly run over at the heel. I had seen many a tramp printer
come up the Journal stairs to hunt a job, but never one who
presented such a disreputable appearance as this story-maker man. He
wore gloves, which seemed rather a contradiction to the general
slovenliness of his attire, but when he took them off to search his
pockets for his credentials, I noticed that his hands were
singularly fine; long, white, and delicately shaped, with thin,
nervous fingers. I have seen pictures of Aubrey Beardsley's hands
that recalled Crane's very vividly.

At that time Crane was but twenty-four, and almost an unknown man.
Hamlin Garland had seen some of his work and believed in him, and
had introduced him to Mr. Howells, who recommended him to the
Bacheller Syndicate. "The Red Badge of Courage" had been published
in the State Journal that winter along with a lot of other syndicate
matter, and the grammatical construction of the story was so faulty
that the managing editor had several times called on me to edit the
copy. In this way I had read it very carefully, and through the

careless sentence-structure I saw the wonder of that remarkable
performance. But the grammar certainly was bad. I remember one of
the reporters who had corrected the phrase "it don't" for the tenth
time remarked savagely, "If I couldn't write better English than
this. I'd quit."

Crane spent several days in the town, living from hand to mouth and
waiting for his money. I think he borrowed a small amount from the
managing editor. He lounged about the office most of the time, and I
frequently encountered him going in and out of the cheap restaurants
on Tenth Street. When he was at the office he talked a good deal in
a wandering, absent-minded fashion, and his conversation was
uniformly frivolous. If he could not evade a serious question by a
joke, he bolted. I cut my classes to lie in wait for him, confident
that in some unwary moment I could trap him into serious
conversation, that if one burned incense long enough and ardently
enough, the oracle would not be dumb. I was Maupassant mad at the
time, a malady particularly unattractive in a Junior, and I made a
frantic effort to get an expression of opinion from him on "Le
Bonheur." "Oh, you're Moping, are you?" he remarked with a sarcastic
grin, and went on reading a little volume of Poe that he carried in
his pocket. At another time I cornered him in the Funny Man's room
and succeeded in getting a little out of him. We were taught
literature by an exceedingly analytical method at the University,
and we probably distorted the method, and I was busy trying to find
the least common multiple of _Hamlet_ and the greatest common
divisor of _Macbeth_, and I began asking him whether stories were
constructed by cabalistic formulae. At length he sighed wearily and
shook his drooping shoulders, remarking:

"Where did you get all that rot? Yarns aren't done by mathematics.
You can't do it by rule any more than you can dance by rule. You
have to have the itch of the thing in your fingers, and if you
haven't,—well, you're damned lucky, and you'll live long and
prosper, that's all."—And with that he yawned and went down the
hall.

Crane was moody most of the time, his health was bad and he seemed
profoundly discouraged. Even his jokes were exceedingly drastic. He
went about with the tense, preoccupied, self-centered air of a man
who is brooding over some impending disaster, and I conjectured
vainly as to what it might be. Though he was seemingly entirely idle
during the few days I knew him, his manner indicated that he was in
the throes of work that told terribly on his nerves. His eyes I
remember as the finest I have ever seen, large and dark and full of

lustre and changing lights, but with a profound melancholy always
lurking deep in them. They were eyes that seemed to be burning
themselves out.

As he sat at the desk with his shoulders drooping forward, his head
low, and his long, white fingers drumming on the sheets of copy
paper, he was as nervous as a race horse fretting to be on the
track. Always, as he came and went about the halls, he seemed like a
man preparing for a sudden departure. Now that he is dead it occurs
to me that all his life was a preparation for sudden departure. I
remember once when he was writing a letter he stopped and asked me
about the spelling of a word, saying carelessly, "I haven't time to
learn to spell."

Then, glancing down at his attire, he added with an absent-minded
smile, "I haven't time to dress either; it takes an awful slice out
of a fellow's life."

He said he was poor, and he certainly looked it, but four years
later when he was in Cuba, drawing the largest salary ever paid a
newspaper correspondent, he clung to this same untidy manner of
dress, and his ragged overalls and buttonless shirt were eyesores to
the immaculate Mr. Davis, in his spotless linen and neat khaki
uniform, with his Gibson chin always freshly shaven. When I first
heard of his serious illness, his old throat trouble aggravated into
consumption by his reckless exposure in Cuba, I recalled a passage
from Maeterlinck's essay, "The Pre-Destined," on those doomed to
early death: "As children, life seems nearer to them than to other
children. They appear to know nothing, and yet there is in their
eyes so profound a certainty that we feel they must know all.—In
all haste, but wisely and with minute care do they prepare
themselves to live, and this very haste is a sign upon which mothers
can scarce bring themselves to look." I remembered, too, the young
man's melancholy and his tenseness, his burning eyes, and his way of
slurring over the less important things, as one whose time is short.

I have heard other people say how difficult it was to induce Crane
to talk seriously about his work, and I suspect that he was
particularly averse to discussions with literary men of wider
education and better equipment than himself, yet he seemed to feel
that this fuller culture was not for him. Perhaps the unreasoning
instinct which lies deep in the roots of our lives, and which guides
us all, told him that he had not time enough to acquire it.

Men will sometimes reveal themselves to children, or to people whom

they think never to see again, more completely than they ever do to
their confreres. From the wise we hold back alike our folly and our
wisdom, and for the recipients of our deeper confidences we seldom
select our equals. The soul has no message for the friends with whom
we dine every week. It is silenced by custom and convention, and we
play only in the shallows. It selects its listeners willfully, and
seemingly delights to waste its best upon the chance wayfarer who
meets us in the highway at a fated hour. There are moments too, when
the tides run high or very low, when self-revelation is necessary to
every man, if it be only to his valet or his gardener. At such a
moment, I was with Mr. Crane.

The hoped for revelation came unexpectedly enough. It was on the
last night he spent in Lincoln. I had come back from the theatre and
was in the Journal office writing a notice of the play. It was
eleven o'clock when Crane came in. He had expected his money to
arrive on the night mail and it had not done so, and he was out of
sorts and deeply despondent. He sat down on the ledge of the open
window that faced on the street, and when I had finished my notice I
went over and took a chair beside him. Quite without invitation on
my part, Crane began to talk, began to curse his trade from the
first throb of creative desire in a boy to the finished work of the
master. The night was oppressively warm; one of those dry winds that
are the curse of that country was blowing up from Kansas. The white,
western moonlight threw sharp, blue shadows below us. The streets
were silent at that hour, and we could hear the gurgle of the
fountain in the Post Office square across the street, and the twang
of banjos from the lower verandah of the Hotel Lincoln, where the
colored waiters were serenading the guests. The drop lights in the
office were dull under their green shades, and the telegraph sounder
clicked faintly in the next room. In all his long tirade. Crane
never raised his voice; he spoke slowly and monotonously and even
calmly, but I have never known so bitter a heart in any man as he
revealed to me that night. It was an arraignment of the wages of
life, an invocation to the ministers of hate.

Incidentally he told me the sum he had received for "The Red Badge
of Courage," which I think was something like ninety dollars, and he
repeated some lines from "The Black Riders," which was then in
preparation. He gave me to understand that he led a double literary
life; writing in the first place the matter that pleased himself,
and doing it very slowly; in the second place, any sort of stuff
that would sell. And he remarked that his poor was just as bad as it
could possibly be. He realized, he said, that his limitations were
absolutely impassable. "What I can't do, I can't do at all, and I

can't acquire it. I only hold one trump."

He had no settled plans at all. He was going to Mexico wholly
uncertain of being able to do any successful work there, and he
seemed to feel very insecure about the financial end of his venture.

The thing that most interested me was what he said about his slow
method of composition. He declared that there was little money in
story-writing at best, and practically none in it for him, because
of the time it took him to work up his detail. Other men, he said,
could sit down and write up an experience while the physical effect
of it, so to speak, was still upon them, and yesterday's impressions
made to-day's "copy." But when he came in from the streets to write
up what he had seen there, his faculties were benumbed, and he sat
twirling his pencil and hunting for words like a schoolboy.

I mentioned "The Red Badge of Courage," which was written in nine
days, and he replied that, though the writing took very little time,
he had been unconsciously working the detail of the story out
through most of his boyhood. His ancestors had been soldiers, and he
had been imagining war stories ever since he was out of
knickerbockers, and in writing his first war story he had simply
gone over his imaginary campaigns and selected his favorite
imaginary experiences. He declared that his imagination was hide
bound; it was there, but it pulled hard. After he got a notion for a
story, months passed before he could get any sort of personal
contract with it, or feel any potency to handle it. "The detail of a
thing has to filter through my blood, and then it comes out like a
native product, but it takes forever," he remarked. I distinctly
remember the illustration, for it rather took hold of me.

I have often been astonished since to hear Crane spoken of as "the
reporter in fiction," for the reportorial faculty of superficial
reception and quick transference was what he conspicuously lacked.
His first newspaper account of his shipwreck on the filibuster
"Commodore" off the Florida coast was as lifeless as the "copy" of a
police court reporter. It was many months afterwards that the
literary product of his terrible experience appeared in that
marvellous sea story "The Open Boat," unsurpassed in its vividness
and constructive perfection.

At the close of our long conversation that night, when the copy boy
came in to take me home, I suggested to Crane that in ten years he
would probably laugh at all his temporary discomfort. Again his body
took on that strenuous tension and he clenched his hands, saying, "I
can't wait ten years, I haven't time."

The ten years are not up yet, and he has done his work and gathered
his reward and gone. Was ever so much experience and achievement
crowded into so short a space of time? A great man dead at
twenty-nine! That would have puzzled the ancients. Edward Garnett
wrote of him in The Academy of December 17,1899: "I cannot remember
a parallel in the literary history of fiction. Maupassant, Meredith,

Henry James, Mr. Howells and Tolstoy, were all learning their
expression at an age where Crane had achieved his and achieved it
triumphantly." He had the precocity of those doomed to die in youth.

I am convinced that when I met him he had a vague premonition of the
shortness of his working day, and in the heart of the man there was
that which said, "That thou doest, do quickly."

At twenty-one this son of an obscure New Jersey rector, with but a
scant reading knowledge of French and no training, had rivaled in
technique the foremost craftsmen of the Latin races. In the six
years since I met him, a stranded reporter, he stood in the firing
line during two wars, knew hairbreadth 'scapes on land and sea, and
established himself as the first writer of his time in the picturing
of episodic, fragmentary life. His friends have charged him with
fickleness, but he was a man who was in the preoccupation of haste.

He went from country to country, from man to man, absorbing all that
was in them for him. He had no time to look backward. He had no
leisure for _camaraderie_. He drank life to the lees, but at the
banquet table where other men took their ease and jested over their
wine, he stood a dark and silent figure, sombre as Poe himself, not
wishing to be understood; and he took his portion in haste, with his
loins girded, and his shoes on his feet, and his staff in his hand,
like one who must depart quickly.

_The Library_, June 23,1900

SOME CURIOUS VERSIONS OF SHAKESPEARE

By Frederick W. Kilbourne
Poet Lore, Fall 1905

TWO previous articles in Poet Lore have been devoted to a dis
cussion of the whole subject of versions of Shakespeare before
1800, and to a catalogue raisonne of such works, with a short
characterization of those about which information is obtain
able. Even the brief statements or descriptions therein given
are sufficient to indicate that many of these alterations differ

greatly, and some of them very strangely, from their originals.

Thinking that it may be of interest to have fuller accounts of some
of the more curious of these products of the perverse ingenuity of Shake
speare's adapters and would-be improvers, I have selected for this purpose
several of the remade plays, whose right to be characterized as strange will
be conceded, I am sure, to be beyond dispute.

The first I shall take up is Charles Johnson's alteration of 'As You
Like It,' which, for the sake of having a more significant title, he called
Love in a Forest. Johnson, who was a tavern-keeper as well as a writer
of plays, and as a poetaster of the time is said to be mentioned in one of
the versions of the ' Dunciad,' dedicated the printed copies of his play to
the Worshipful Society of Free Masons, of which he was evidently an
enthusiastic member.

The play, when acted in 1723, met with no success, and was withdrawn
after six performances. Strangely enough, its original seems to have been
entirely unknown to the stage of the period, for there is no record of its
representation from the Restoration until 1740, when it was acted about
twenty-five times at Drury Lane. This fact makes all the more laudable
Johnson's desire, as expressed in his prologue, of restoring to the stage
one more of Shakespeare's plays, and had he been content with this and not
have deemed it necessary to revise Shakespeare for the purpose, we should
have been much indebted to him. But unfortunately his judgment was at
fault and he stultified himself by his declaration that he had ' refined hiss
[Shakespeare's] ore,' ' weeded the beautiful parterre,' and ' restored the
scheme from time and error.' Behold the result of the refining, weeding,
and restoring processes! Touchstone, Audrey, William, Corin, and Phoebe
are removed root and branch. Silvius appears only in Act II, Scene 4,
where he speaks about twenty lines given to Corin in the original. How
the deficiency thus created is made up will be seen in the course of the account
of the play, which follows.

The first two acts are not greatly changed. A ludicrous modification
is that of the wrestling bout to a combat in the lists, before beginning which
Charles and Orlando defy each other with the speeches of Bolingbroke and
Norfolk in ' Richard the Second,' I. i. Jacques himself reports his moral
izing on the deer, a change approved by Genest but criticized by Furness
as ' obliterating one of Shakespeare's artistic touches, whereby an important
character is described and the keynote struck before he himself appears."

More considerable changes appear in the Third Act. The verses which
Celia ought to read are omitted, and she makes the comments and verses
given to Touchstone in Shakespeare's play. After Orlando and Jacques
enter, the chief change in the play is instituted, namely, the wooing of Celia
by Jacques. This is done in the words of Touchstone to Audrey, patched

with some speeches of Benedick's from ' Much Ado,' the whole dialogue
being given an eighteenth century tone. This ' monstrous device,' curiously
enough, anticipates George Sand's French version of the play, Comme il
Vous Plaira, but the coincidence is undoubtedly a mere accident, as it is
not likely she had read Johnson's play.

The Fourth Act opens with a conversation in which Jacques tells Rosa
lind of his love for Celia. Viola's speech,' She never told her love,' etc., is
inserted in the scene between Rosalind and Orlando. It is Robert Du Bois
who brings Rosalind Orlando's excuse for not keeping his promise, and
he is the brother who is rescued from the lioness. Oliver is reported as
having made away with himself to escape punishment, thus making Orlando
his father's heir.

Of course, the changes already made affect the denouement somewhat,
but the play ends substantially as in Shakespeare, except that Jacques marries
Celia. To compensate for the omitted portions, the burlesque play of
Pyramus and Thisbe from ' Midsummer Night's Dream ' is dragged in,
being represented before the Duke during the interval between the exit of
the disguised Rosalind and her return in her true character.

Johnson's chief purpose appears to have been to give the play greater
unity of action by limiting the action to fewer characters and to improvf
the characterizations of the chief persons. In following out the first design
he has deprived us of some of the best of the original; how lamentably he
has failed in the second is almost too obvious from the foregoing account
of his strange changes to need comment.

What shall be said of the transformation of the melancholy Jacques
into an eighteenth century lover? It is certainly most remarkable. One
of Shakespeare's most distinctive characters, a universal favorite nowadays,
is to our minds thereby entirely spoiled. Nothing but a complete failure
to comprehend the great dramatist's purpose or ignorance of true
dramatic art could have brought about such a perversion. The comedy is,
as Furness points out, so thoroughly English that it cannot be transplanted
to German or French soil. The Germans cannot appreciate the sparkling
wit and vivacity of Rosalind, and consequently turn to Jacques and Touch
stone as the leading characters. How it strikes a French mind may be
learned from an examination of Sand's Comme II Vous Plaira, in which
Jacques is made the hero, being converted from a misogynist into a jealous
lover, almost provoked to a duel with Orlando by Celia's coquetry. John
son's mind seems to have undergone a sort of Frenchification, if one may
so speak, the process being checked, however, before it was completed, so
that he did not carry the change in the characterization of Jacques so far
as his French successor. At any rate, both, it will be admitted, have debased

the character most effectually. Perhaps the best criticism on the trans
formed Jacques is that which Johnson makes Celia herself utter, 'Jacques's
love looks a little awkward; it does not sit so easy on him.' We should,
however, amend it by making the language stronger.

The omission of Touchstone and Audrey deprives us of some of the
most delightful comedy to be found anywhere, and that of Corin and Phoebe
lowers the characterization of Rosalind somewhat by taking away from her
her desire to make a lover happy by using her good offices in his behalf.
Another useless and very bad change is the removal of Oliver and the
substitution of Robert as the brother rescued by Orlando. This was made
necessary by the change in the lover of Celia. Perhaps, also, Johnson had
in mind poetical justice, which would be, in his opinion, better satisfied by
having Oliver take his own life. But how much it injures the conception of
Orlando, besides removing one of the chief teachings of the play, the lesson
of forgiveness, to take away from him the opportunity to show his mag
nanimity in preserving and forgiving an enemy! We must admit that
Oliver's conversion is a little sudden, the great dramatist being undoubtedly
influenced not a little by the dramatic convention which called for a pairing
off of the chief characters in the fifth act. Nevertheless, one gets a fresh
admiration for Shakespeare's genius, in observing his method of ' making
earthly things even,' as compared with that of his uninspired reviser.

A greater Johnson has lamented that Shakespeare lost the opportunity
for a fine piece of moralizing, in not recording the conversation between the
usurping duke and the hermit. Fortunately this idea did not occur to his
lesser namesake, for which we may be grateful.

The dialogue when Shakespeare is followed is not greatly altered, but

of course Johnson's changes and omissions make necessary much of his own

composition.

As a concluding word it may be affirmed that this version is an ex
tremely bad transformation of Shakespeare's most charming comedy. As
we have seen, it was the opinion even of Johnson's contemporaries that
this play was not good.

Another pleasing comedy that has suffered violence at the hands of
revisers and adapters is ' The Taming of the Shrew,' as, besides being al
tered, it has been resorted to for farces and afterpieces.

The chief alteration is so unique as to be well worth a little attention.

Here, again, there is a change of title, but in this case it is a much more vio
lent one. Indeed were the original title not appended as a subtitle to the
altered play, the disguise would be complete. Sauny, the Scot, or the Tam
ing of the Shrew, is one of the earliest versions of Shakespeare, for it was
first acted in April, 1667, although not printed until 1698. It is attrib

uted, with much probability, to the Actor Lacy, though Langbaine in his
account of dramatic writers does not speak of it as his. Lacy himself took
the part of Sauny, who is Grumio turned into a Scotchman. The play met
with considerable success, although Pepys, who records seeing it, thought
it' generally but a mean play ' with ' some very good pieces in it.'

The scene of the play is transferred to London, the dialogue is short
ened and strangely enough converted into prose, and the fifth act is almost
entirely new. Petruchio remains as in the original, but the names of the
most of the other dramatis personam are changed. Katherine becomes
Margaret, daughter of Lord Beaufoy (Baptista). In Winlove, son of
Sir Lionel Winlove, and a country gentleman of Oxford education, may be
recognized Lucentio, now become an Englishman. Gremio, Hortensio, and
Biondello become respectively Woodall, a rich old citizen, Geraldo, and
Jamy. The character of Sauny is much more important than that of
Grumio in Shakespeare's play. He is Petruchio's Scotch servant and a
mere buffoon. Curiously enough, his language, which is often coarse, is
not Scotch in its idiom or apparent pronunciation, but Yorkshire dialect.
Margaret and Petruchio talk like people of the London streets.

The Induction is omitted — not a bad change, as its representation is
unnecessary. The First Act is very short, consisting of Shakespeare's first
scene only. The second scene of Act I and the whole of Act II constitute
Lacy's Second Act. Sauny figures very prominently in this act. Act III
consists of Shakespeare's Third Act with the first two scenes of his Fourth
Act. Winlove (Lucentio) speaks a kind of French English. Petruchio
makes Margaret smoke. Snatchpenny, a London thief, has the part of
the pedant. The remainder of Act IV and the first scene of Act V of the
original make up Lacy's Fourth Act. Woodall is represented as hiring
Winlove, as a Frenchman, to woo Bianca for him. Act V, as has been
said, is almost entirely Lacy's, although the wager on the wives' obedience
is introduced. It consists mainly in a prolongation of Margaret's resist
ance to Petruchio. He declares her to be dead and orders his servants to
carry her out and bury her. The wager episode follows and then the play
ends with a dance.

It will be seen that the play has thus been transformed into a low
comedy or into a mere farce. The change of scene has been attended with
a marked lowering of the whole tone of the play and a striking degradation
of the chief characters. For this the little good humor that has been added
is far from compensating, much less does it excuse it. The prolongation
of Margaret's stubbornness, while perhaps good fooling, certainly cannot
be called an improvement or even a welcome addition. Shakespeare knew
when to stop.

On the whole, the play, although bad enough as an alteration of

Shakespeare, is still a fairly good play, because so much of the original is
retained. There was no call to change the setting and to degrade the play.
This and the destruction of the poetry are the chief features to be con
demned. It is only one more proof of the lack of anything like reverence
for Shakespeare among the playwrights and audiences of the period, that
such a version could be made and, moreover, be tolerated, let alone be re
ceived with applause, as it was.

I pass now to one of the strangest alterations in the list, James Miller's
The Universal Passion, which was acted nine times and printed in 1737.
The Old Variorum editors put it down as a pasticcio of ' Much Ado About
Nothing,' 'As You Like It,' and ' Love's Labor's Lost.' This is not so, as
there is nothing from either of the latter two. Another writer describes
it as an alteration of 'All's Well that Ends Well.' It is evident that these
authorities had not read the play. Any one seeing simply the list of char
acters might easily be led to think it an alteration of several of Shakespear's
plays, but there is no excuse for stating an unverified inference as a fact.
The play is, in truth, a wretched jumble of ' Much Ado about Nothing '
and Moliere's ' Princess of Elis.' Miller in his prologue acknowledges
his indebtedness to Shakespeare, but says nothing of Moliere.

The scene is laid at Genoa and the characters (with their Shake
spearean equivalents) are as follows:

Protheus, a nobleman of Genoa (Benedick);

Joculo, the court jester;

Bellario, a young Venetian lord (Claudio);

Gratiano, the Duke of Genoa (Leonato);

Byron, bastard brother to the Duke (Don John);

Gremio (Borachio and Conrade);

Porco (Dogberry);

Asino (Verges);

Lucilia (Hero);

Liberia (Beatrice);

Delia (Margaret).

Most of the First Act is from Moliere, somewhat altered. Bellario
is in love with Lucilia, but, as she is in the habit of treating her suitors with
contempt, he determines to affect indifference to her. He engages Joculo
to help him. Gratiano, the father of Lucilia, expresses to her his wish
that she should marry and she declares to him her aversion to matrimony.
The remainder of the act, consisting mostly of a wit combat between Pro
theus and Liberia, is from the first and third scenes of the First Act of
' Much Ado.'

Moliere furnishes almost all of Act II, although some dialogue is

taken from Shakespeare. The action is chiefly occupied with the affairs
of Bellario and Lucilia, each of whom pretends to be in love with some one
else.

In the Third Act, the first part of which is chiefly from Moliere, Lu
cilia consents to take Bellario after Joculo tells her that her suitor has res
cued her father from two ruffians and after her father himself urges her
to do so. At this point Miller deserts Moliere, Lucilia is speedily and com
pletely metamorphosed into Shakespeare's Hero, and the play follows
Much Ado in the main, though with many changes in minor details, from
Don Pedro's proposal in Act II, i, to bring about a match between Benedick
and Beatrice to the end.

In attempting to improve upon his original the reviser has fallen into
many absurdities. In particular, the Fifth Act is badly confused. For
example, he introduces a scene between Joculo and Delia in which she begs
that worthy to intercede for her with Lucilia, at a time when that lady is
supposed to be dead.

Miller alters the dialogue greatly, introduces lines from ' Twelfth
Night' and 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' and altogether has succeeded in
making a most wretched amalgamation of two good plays.

It cannot be supposed that a compilation from Shakespeare and Mo
liere should be a wholly bad play. Even the most violent treatment cannot
rob two such geniuses of their vigor, but they have certainly suffered sadly
at the hands of Miller. It is not worth while to do more than censure the
general principle this alteration exhibits. To make a play by combining
different plays of the same author's, or plays in the same language, is bad
enough, but to make one out of the plays of authors writing in different
languages is too contemptible a practice on which to waste any words. Be
sides, in this case, what an absurdity to metamorphose suddenly Moliere's
vivacious heroine, who somewhat resembles Beatrice, into the quiet-spirited
Hero!

As a final word on Miller's lack of art, it may be said that whenever
he varies from his originals he alters for the worse and often succeeds in
spoiling scenes or characters. There can be no dissent from the opinion
that this is about the most outrageous instance of lack of reverence for two
great masters and of the length to which a would-be improver of Shake
speare will go.

There is no better example of the fatuity of attempting to circumscribe
the romantic drama by the artificial rules of the classical drama than the
revision now to be considered, the two tragedies which Sheffield made out
of 'Julius Caesar.'

John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, Marquis of Normanby, and Duke
of Buckinghamshire, was a man and writer of no little reputation in his
day. He was an intimate friend of, and even a co-worker with. Dry den,
who spoke of him as ' Sharp-judging Adriel, the Muses' friend. Himself
a muse,' and who dedicated to him his 'Auranzebe ' and his translation of
the iEneid. He was also a friend of Pope, who ' at the command of His
Grace,' wrote two of the choruses in the Duke's second play. Of course,
living in the age that he did, he would be likely to be a thoroughgoing
classicist, and those who have read his verse Essay on Poetry will not need
to be told that he was in accord with his time. This being the case, one
can readily anticipate that, when he set to work to alter ' Julius Caesar,' he
would have the intention of making it' regular ' if possible, and such we
find to be the spirit in which his revision was made.

His alterations were never acted, but were published by his duchess
in 1722, after his death. In order to observe the unities and to bring
Shakespeare's play into harmony with the classical form, he divided it, as
has been said, into two plays, which he called ' The Tragedy of Julius
Casar' and 'The Death of Marcus Brutus,' and furnished each with a pro
logue and choruses. In the prologue to the first play, he says,

' Hope to mend Shakespeare ! or to match his style !

'Tis such a jest would make a stoic smile.

Too fond of fame, our poet soars too high;

Yet freely owns he wants the wings to fly;

That he confesses while he does the fault.'

If such was his real opinion we wonder at his vanity in undertaking
this well-nigh impossible task. Sheffield is so solicitous lest anyone should
think he neglects to observe the unity of time, that he is careful to state that
the play begins the day before Caesar's death and ends within an hour
after it.

The alterations in the plot of the first play are slight, but the diction
is much changed and thare is a good deal of Sheffield's own poetry. In
the First Act, all the low comedy is omitted and the offering of the crown is
made a part of the action. In Act II, the scene between Brutus and Portia
is transformed into an insipid love dialogue. Calphurnia is omitted in Act
III, the ill omens being reported by the priests. Act IV is without change
as to action. Brutus's address is turned into blank verse and the Fifth Act
ends with Antony's address, the opening lines of which are worth quoting
as an example of Sheffield's improvement upon Shakespeare.

'Friends, countrymen, and Romans, hear me gently;

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

Lo here the fatal end of all his glory :

The evil that men do, lives after them;

The good is often bury'd in their graves;

So let it be with Caesar. Noble Brutus
Has told you Caesar was ambitious :

If he was so, then he was much to blame;

And he has dearly paid for his offense.

I come to do my duty to dead Caesar.'

The second tragedy, having but two acts of the original to draw upon,
called for much additional material. Accordingly the Duke introduces
several new characters, as Theodotus, a philosopher; Dolabella; Varius,
a young Roman, bred at Athens; and Junia, wife of Cassius and sister of
Brutus. In reality, an almost entirely new play is manufactured, as the
first three acts are entirely Sheffield's, and although the substance of the
fourth and fifth acts is Shakespeare's, the words are the Duke's. Many
variations are made even when the scenes are founded on Shakespeare. For
instance, instead of Pindarus unwillingly holding the sword for Cassius
to run upon, the servant kills himself, after which his master, encouraged
by his example, or reproached by it, stabs himself. This is precisely as in
the case of Eros and Antony, in 'Antony and Cleopatra,' which probably
suggested the change here.

The scene lies at Athens in the first three acts and near Philippi in
the last two. The Duke apologizes for thus violating the unity of place:

' Our scene is Athens :

But here our author, besides other faults
Of ill expressions and of vulgar thoughts,

Commits one crime that needs an act of grace
And breaks the law of unity of place.'

Truly an audacious thing to do ! The unity of time, however, we are
informed, has been preserved, for the play begins the day before the battle
of Philippi and ends with that event. Here the Duke's solicitude has made
him absurdly inconsistent, for the movements could not be made from
Athens to Philippi in the time, nor could Cassius get back in twenty-four
hours from Sardis, where Junia says he has gone. Probably his grace did
not look into the geography of his scene, which is unpardonable in so great
a stickler for correctness.

This is the only attempt to give a play of Shakespeare's a strictly clas
sical form, and no reader of the Duke's plays will have any doubt as to the
superiority of Shakespeare's treatment. The best excuse for Sheffield's

two plays lies in Shakespeare's duality of heroes. But Brutus is the one
upon whom Shakespeare meant to fix the greatest attention, and his pur
pose is to show how Brutus's misfortunes come as the result of his one
error in assassinating Caesar — doing evil that good may come. Shake
speare's reason for not ending his play with the murder of Caesar appears in
the words of Brutus over Cassius's body:

'O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!

Thy spirit walks abroad and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails.'

But the critics, among them the Duke, did not see this in their shortsighted
ness.

The battle between the classicists and the romanticists over the unities
has been fought and the victory lies with the latter, so there is no necessity
for a discussion of them here. Suffice it to say that the attempt to make
over Shakespeare's play so as to conform to them has resulted in a very bad
alteration of it. Sheffield's inconsistency has been pointed out, and when,
besides his violence to the construction of the play, he has so spoiled the
verse, as the sample given abundantly testifies, we can have nothing but
contempt for his misguided efforts.

There are several other versions that might properly claim a place
in an article dealing with curious ones. Indeed, so many of them belong
more or less to this category that it is difficult to choose among them. But
a stop must be made somewhere, and so I have fixed upon Otway's Cams
Marius as the last I shall describe. This play, which is, strictly, not a
version of Shakespeare at all but a borrowing, or rather a theft, from him,
certainly bears a highly curious relation to ' Romeo and Juliet,' from which
it is in part taken.

That Otway, who, at his best, could produce the finest tragedies of
his age, should stoop to commit such a literary crime as this play exhibits —
he says himself that he has ' rifled him [Shakespeare] of half a play ' —
can be explained only as due to the exigency of his pecuniary affairs.

The quarrel between Marius and Sulla doubtless occurred to him as
a suitable subject for a tragedy and, having, as usual, to write for bread,
he was probably anxious to have his play ready at the earliest possible
moment. The feud between the houses of Montague and Capulet being
familiar to him, he evidently, in an evil moment, conceived the idea of
transferring its incidents to the enmity between the partisans of Marius
and those of Sulla, and of making use also of as much of Shakespeare's
dialogue as his plan permitted. 'To such low shifts, of late,' says he, by
way of apology,' are poets worn.'

In treating of this strange hodgepodge of Shakespeare and Roman
history, I shall pay attention only to the Shakespearean portions, as being
those that come within the scope of my subject. As to the character of the
parts of the play which are Otway 's own, no more need be said than that
they follow fairly closely the historical facts.

Caius Marius is represented as having a son, Marius Junior, who is
in love with Lavinia, daughter of Metellus. The last is a partisan of
Sulla and wishes his chief to be his son-in-law. This device affords oppor
tunity to introduce several scenes and many passages from ' Romeo and
Juliet.' The greater part of the Nurse's character is retained and Sulpitius
uses some of Mercutio's speeches.

The First Act is almost all Otway's. A mangled form of the descrip
tion of Queen Mab is spoken by Sulpitius. In the Second Act, Metellus
expresses to Lavinia his desire that she should be married, as Lady Capulet
does to Juliet; most of the Nurse's lines appear, but in prose, and Metellus
speaks some of Capulet's lines in III., 5, of ' Romeo and Juliet.' Sulpitius
conjures for Marius Junior, as Mercutio for Romeo in Shakespeare, and
then follows the garden scene between Marius Junior and Lavinia, most of
the lines being taken from Shakespeare. The Third Act includes con
siderable of ' Romeo and Juliet': Lavinia's nurse comes to young Marius
and is quizzed by Sulpitius; Lavinia speaks Juliet's soliloquy in III., 2;
and then cames a scene between her and the Nurse, somewhat as in Shake
speare's II., 5. In the Fourth Act about twenty lines of Shakespeare's III.,

5 are introduced in the parting scene between Marius Junior and Lavinia,
the Priest of Hymen gives her a sleeping potion, she speaks some lines from
IV., 1, and, after the priest goes out, Juliet's soliloquy in IV., 3. Shake
speare is again laid under a heavy contribution in Otway's last act. The
Nurse discovers Lavinia apparently dead, Marius Junior hears of her death,
soliloquizes as in Shakespeare, and buys poison of an apothecary. At the
tomb young Marius kills the priest, not knowing who he is, and drinks the
poison, but before he dies Lavinia awakes. She later kills herself, and the
play ends with some lines, partly Mercutio's, spoken by Sulpitius.

From this brief account of the relation of Otway's play to Shake
speare's it will be seen that Otway speaks truly when he declares he has
pilfered half a play. He makes some changes in the passages he steals,
in the way of abridgement, and to some of the scenes he follows he adds
considerable of his own.

It is not worth while to waste any time or words upon such a contempt
ible piece of thieving as this. It would seem as if Otway might have found
material enough for a play without resorting to such an expedient. The
only redeeming feature of it all is that he had sufficient good sense not to

alter greatly what he stole, but this scarcely makes his sin the less.

His main change, the restoration of Lavinia to consciousness before
Marius Junior dies, is pronounced by Genest to be an improvement, and this
device is retained in Theophilus Gibber's version and in Garrick's, and the
revision of the latter by Kemble. Whether it heightens the pathos of the
situation or not is a debatable question. It may make it a little more
tragic, but it seems almost too much piling on of agony to make Romeo
discover that he has poisoned himself unnecessarily.

KEPLER.

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Gallery of Portraits: with Memoirs.
Volume 3, by Various

The matter contained in this sketch of Kepler's history, is exclusively
derived from the Life published in the Library of Useful Knowledge. To
that work we refer all readers who wish to make themselves acquainted
with the contents of Kepler's writings, and with the singular methods by
which he was led to his great discoveries: it will be evident, on
inspection, that it would be useless to attempt farther compression of
the scientific matter therein contained. Our object therefore will be to
select such portions as may best illustrate his singular and
enthusiastic mind, and to give a short account of his not uneventful
life.

John Kepler was born December 21,1571, Long. 29° 7', Lat. 48° 54', as
we are carefully informed by his earliest biographer Hantsch. It is well
to add that on the spot thus astronomically designated as our
astronomer's birth-place, stands the city of Weil, in the Duchy of
Wirtemberg. Kepler was first sent to school at Elmendingen, where his
father, a soldier of honourable family, but indigent circumstances, kept
a tavern: his education was completed at the monastic school of
Maulbronn, and the college of Tubingen, where he took his Master's
degree in 1591. About the same time he was offered the astronomical
lectureship at Gratz, in Styria: and he accepted the post by advice, and
almost by compulsion, of his tutors, "better furnished," he says, "with
talent than knowledge, and with many protestations that I was not
abandoning my claim to be provided for in some other more brilliant
profession." Though well skilled in mathematics, and devoted to the
study of philosophy, he had felt hitherto no especial vocation to
astronomy, although he had become strongly impressed with the truth of
the Copernican system, and had defended it publicly in the schools of
Tubingen. He was much engrossed by inquiries of a very different
character: and it is fortunate for his fame that circumstances withdrew

him from the mystical pursuits to which through life he was more or less
addicted; from such profitless toil as the "examination of the nature of
heaven, of souls, of genii, of the elements, of the essence of fire, of
the cause of fountains, of the ebb and flow of the tide, the shape of
the continents and inland seas, and things of this sort," to which, he
says, he had devoted much time. The sort of spirit in which he was
likely to enter on the more occult of these inquiries, and the sort of
agency to which he was likely to ascribe the natural phenomena of which
he speaks, may be estimated from an opinion which he gravely advanced in
mature years and established fame, that the earth is an enormous living
animal, with passions and affections analogous to those of the creatures
which live on its surface. "The earth is not an animal like a dog, ready
at every nod; but more like a bull or an elephant, slow to become angry,
and so much the more furious when incensed." "If any one who has climbed
the peaks of the highest mountains throw a stone down their very deep
clefts, a sound is heard from them; or if he throw it into one of the
mountain lakes, which beyond doubt are bottomless, a storm will
immediately arise, just as when you thrust a straw into the ear or nose
of a ticklish animal, it shakes its head, and runs shuddering away. What
so like breathing, especially of those fish who draw water into their
mouths, and spout it out again through their gills, as that wonderful
tide! For although it is so regulated according to the course of the
moon, that in the preface to my 'Commentaries on Mars' I have mentioned
it as probable that the waters are attracted by the moon, as iron is by
the loadstone, yet if any one uphold that the earth regulates its
breathing according to the motion of the sun and moon, as animals have
daily and nightly alternations of sleep and waking, I shall not think
his philosophy unworthy of being listened to; especially if any flexible
parts should be discovered in the depths of the earth to supply the
functions of lungs or gills."

The first fruit of Kepler's astronomical researches was entitled
'Prodromus Dissertationis Cosmographicae,' the first part of a work to be
called 'Mysterium Cosmographicum,' of which, however, the sequel was
never written. The most remarkable part of the book is a fanciful
attempt to show that the orbits of the planets may be represented by
spheres circumscribed and inscribed in the five regular solids. Kepler
lived to be convinced of the total baselessness of this supposed
discovery, in which, however, at the time, he expressed high exultation.

In the same work are contained his first inquiries into the proportion
between the distances of the planets from the sun and their periods of
revolution. He also attempted to account for the motion of the planets,
by supposing a moving influence emitted like light from the sun, which
swept round those bodies, as the sails of a windmill would carry any
thing attached to them: of a genuine central force he had no knowledge.

though he had speculated on the existence of an attractive force in the
centre of motion, and rejected it on account of difficulties which he
could not explain. The 'Prodromus' was published in 1596, and the genius
and industry displayed in it gained praise from the best astronomers of
the age.

In the following year Kepler withdrew from Gratz into Hungary,
apprehending danger from the unadvised promulgation of some, apparently
religious, opinions. During this retirement he became acquainted with
the celebrated Tycho Brahe, at that time retained by the Emperor Rodolph
II. as an astrologer and mathematician, and residing at the castle of
Benach, near Prague. Kepler, harassed throughout life by poverty, was
received by his more fortunate fellow-labourer with cordial kindness. No
trace of jealousy is to be found in their intercourse. Tycho placed the
observations which he had made with unremitted industry during many
years in the hands of Kepler, and used his interest with the Emperor to
obtain permission for his brother astronomer to remain at Benach as
assistant observer, retaining his salary and professorship at Gratz.

Before all was settled, however, Kepler finally threw up that office,
and remained, it should seem, entirely dependent on Tycho's bounty. The
Dane was then employed in constructing a new set of astronomical tables,
to be called the Rudolphine, intended to supersede those calculated on
the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. He was interrupted in this labour
by death, in 1601; and the task of finishing it was intrusted to Kepler,
who succeeded him as principal mathematician to the Emperor. A large
salary was attached to this office, but to extract any portion of it
from a treasury deranged and almost exhausted by a succession of wars,
proved next to impossible. He remained for several years, as he himself
expresses it, begging his bread from the Emperor at Prague, during which
the Rudolphine Tables remained neglected, for want of funds to defray
the expenses of continuing them. He published, however, several smaller
works; a treatise on Optics, entitled a Supplement to Vitellion, in
which he made an unsuccessful attempt to determine the cause and the
laws of refraction; a small work on a new star which appeared in
Cassiopeia in 1604, and shone for a time with great splendour; another
on comets, in which he suggests the possibility of their being planets
moving in straight lines. Meanwhile he was continuing his labours on the
observations of Tycho, and especially on those relating to the planet
Mars: and the result of them appeared in 1609, in his work entitled
' Astronomia Nova;' or Commentaries on the motions of Mars. He engaged in
these extensive calculations from dissatisfaction with the existing
theories, by none of which could the observed and calculated motions of
the planets be made to coincide; but without any notion whither the task
was about to lead him, or of rejecting the complicated machinery of
former astronomers —

the sphere

With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er.

Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.

His inquiries are remarkable for the patience with which he continued to
devise hypotheses, one after another, and the scrupulous fidelity with
which he rejected them in succession, as they proved irreconcileable
with the unerring test of observation. Not less remarkable is the
singular good fortune by which, while groping in the dark among
erroneous principles and erroneous assumptions, he was led, by careful
observation of Mars, to discover the true form of its orbit, and the
true law of its motion, and the motion of all planets, round the sun.

These are enunciated in two of the three celebrated theorems known by
the name of Kepler's Laws, beyond comparison the most important
discoveries made in astronomy from the time of Copernicus to that of
Newton, of which the first is, that the planets move in ellipses, in one
of the foci of which the sun is placed the second, that the time of
describing any arc is proportional, in the same orbit, to the area
comprised by the arc itself, and lines drawn from the sun to the
beginning and end of it.

About the year 1613 Kepler quitted Prague, after a residence of eleven
years, to assume a professorship in the University of Linz. The year
preceding his departure saw him involved in great domestic distress.

Want of money, sickness, the occupation of the city by a turbulent army,
the death of his wife and of the son whom he best loved, these, he says
to a correspondent, "were reasons enough why I should have overlooked
not only your letter, but even astronomy itself." His first marriage,
contracted early in life, had not been a happy one: but he resolved on a
second venture, and no less than eleven ladies were successively the
objects of his thoughts. After rejecting, or being rejected, by the
whole number, he at last settled on her who stood fifth in the list; a
woman of humble station, but, according to his own account, possessed of
qualities likely to wear well in a poor man's house. He employed the
judgment and the mediation of his friends largely in this delicate
matter: and in a letter to the Baron Strahlendorf, he has given a full
and amusing account of the process of his courtships, and the
qualifications of the ladies among whom his judgment wavered. He
proposed to one lady whom he had not seen for six years, and was
rejected: on paying her a visit soon after, he found, to his great
relief, that she had not a single pleasing point about her. Another was
too proud of her birth; another too old; another married a more ardent
lover, while Kepler was speculating whether he would take her or not;
and a fifth punished the indecision which he had shown towards others by

alternations of consent and denial, until after a three months'
courtship, the longest in the list, he gave her up in despair.

Kepler did not long hold his professorship at Linz. Some religious
opinions relative to the doctrine of transubstantiation gave offence to
the Roman Catholic party, and he was excommunicated. In 1617 he received
an invitation to fill the chair of mathematics at Bologna: this however
he declined, pleading his German origin and predilections, and his
German habits of freedom in speech and manners, which he thought likely
to expose him to persecution or reproach in Italy. In 1618 he published
his Epitome of the Copernican system, a summary of his philosophical
opinions, drawn up in the form of question and answer. In 1619 appeared
his celebrated work 'Harmonice Mundi/ dedicated to King James I. of
England; a book strongly illustrative of the peculiarities of Kepler's
mind, combining the accuracy of geometric science with the wildest
metaphysical doctrines, and visionary theories of celestial influences.

The two first books are almost strictly geometrical; the third treats of
music; for the fourth and fifth, we take refuge from explaining their
subjects in transcribing the author's exposition of their contents. "The
fourth, metaphysical, psychological, and astrological, on the mental
essence of harmonies, and of their kinds in the world, especially on the
harmony of rays emanating on the earth from the heavenly bodies, and on
their effect in nature, and on the sublunary and human soul; the fifth,
astronomical and metaphysical, on the very exquisite harmonies of the
celestial motions, and the origin of the eccentricities in harmonious
proportions." This work, however, is remarkable for containing amid the
varied extravagances of its two last books, the third of Kepler's Laws,
namely, that the squares of the periods of the planets' revolution vary
as the cubes of their distances from the sun; a discovery in which he
exulted with no measured joy. "It is now eighteen months since I got the
first glimpse of light, three months since the dawn, very few days since
the unveiled sun, most admirable to gaze upon, burst out upon me.

Nothing holds me; I will indulge in my sacred fury; I will triumph over
mankind by the honest confession that I have stolen the golden vases of
the Egyptians, to build up a tabernacle for my God far away from the
confines of Egypt. If you forgive me, I rejoice; if you are angry, I can
bear it: the die is cast, the book is written; to be read either now or
by posterity, I care not which: it may well wait a century for a reader,
as God has waited six thousand years for an observer."

The substance of Kepler's astrological opinions is contained in this
work. It is remarkable that one whose candour and good faith are so
conspicuous, one so intent on correcting his various theories by
observation and experience, should have given in to this now generally
rejected system of imposture and credulity; nay should profess to have

been forced to adopt it from direct and positive observations. "A most
unfailing experience (as far as can be hoped in natural phenomena), of
the excitement of sublunary nature by the conjunctions and aspects of
the planets, has instructed and compelled my unwilling belief." At the
same time he professed through life a supreme contempt for the common
herd of nativity casters, and claimed to be the creator of a "new and
most true philosophy, a tender plant which, like all other novelties,
ought to be carefully nursed and cherished." His plant was rooted in the
sand, and it has perished; nor is it important to explain the fine-spun
differences by which his own astrological belief was separated from
another not more baseless. Poor through life, he relieved his ever
recurring wants by astrological calculations: and he enjoyed
considerable reputation in this line, and received ample remuneration
for his predictions. It was principally as astrologers that both Tycho
Brahe and Kepler were valued by the Emperor Rudolph: and it was in the
same capacity that the latter was afterwards entertained by Wallenstein.
One circumstance may suggest a doubt whether his predictions were alway
scrupulously honest. From the year 1617 to 1620, he published an annual
Ephemeris, concerning which he writes thus: "In order to pay the expense
of the Ephemeris for these two years, I have also written a _vile
prophesying almanac^ which is hardly more respectable than begging;
unless it be because it saves the Emperor's credit, who abandons me
entirely, and, with all his frequent and recent orders in council, would
suffer me to perish with hunger." Poverty is a hard task-master; yet
Kepler should not have condescended to become the Francis Moore of his
day.

In 1620, Kepler was strongly urged by Sir Henry Wotton, then ambassador
to Venice, to take refuge in England from the difficulties which beset
him. This invitation was not open to the objections which had deterred
him from accepting an appointment in Italy: but love of his native land
prevailed to make him decline it also. He continued to weary the
Imperial Government with solicitations for money to defray the expense
of the Rudolphine Tables, which were not printed until 1627. These were
the first calculated on the supposition of elliptic orbits, and contain,
besides tables of the sun and planets, logarithmic and other tables to
facilitate calculation, the places of one thousand stars as determined
by Tycho, and a table of refractions. Similar tables of the planetary
motions had been constructed by Ptolemy, and reproduced with alterations
in the thirteenth century under the direction of Alphonso, King of
Castile. Others, called the Prussian Tables, had been calculated after
the discoveries of Copernicus, by two of that great astronomer's pupils.

All these, however, were superseded in consequence of the observations
of Tycho Brahe, observations far more accurate than had ever before been
made: and for the publication of the Rudolphine Tables alone, which for

a long time continued unsurpassed in exactness, the name of Kepler would
deserve honourable remembrance.

Kepler was the first of the Germans to appreciate and use Napier's
invention of logarithms: and he himself calculated and published a
series, under the title 'Chilias Logarithmorum/ in 1624. Not long after
the Rudolphine Tables were printed, he received permission from the
Emperor Ferdinand to attach himself to the celebrated Wallenstein, a
firm believer in the science of divination by the stars. In him Kepler
found a more munificent patron than he had yet enjoyed; and by his
influence he was appointed to a professorship at the University of
Rostock, in the Duchy of Mecklenburgh. But the niggardliness of the
Imperial Court, which kept him starving through life, was in some sense
the cause of his death. He had claims on it to the amount of eight
thousand crowns, which he took a journey to Ratisbon to enforce, but
without success. Fatigue or disappointment brought on a fever which put
an end to his life in November, 1630, in his 59th year. A plain stone,
with a simple inscription, marked his grave in St. Peter's church-yard,
in that city. Within seventy paces of it, a marble monument has been
erected to him in the Botanic Garden, by a late Bishop of Constance. He
left a wife and numerous family ill provided for. His voluminous
manuscripts are now deposited in the Imperial Fibrary of St. Petersburg.
Only one volume of letters, in folio, has been published from them; and
out of these the chief materials for his biography have been extracted.

FIRST VICTORY OF THE AMERICAN NAVY - A D 1779

by Alexander Slidell Mackenzie

from The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Events by Famous Historians,
Volume 14, by Various

American naval officers look back with intensest pride to
Paul Jones, their earliest hero, the founder of those high
traditions which have done so much to raise the navy to its
present standard of efficiency. Decatur, Perry, Farragut,
Dewey, these and a thousand others of their kind, have but
followed the lead of Paul Jones, have learned their deepest
lesson in the thrill that came to each of them in boyhood on
hearing that proud defiance hurled at the ancient mistress
of the seas, " I have not yet begun to fight ."

Although much greater sea-battles, in point of numbers of
both ships and men engaged, are recorded in history, yet

this, the first naval engagement by an American vessel, is
counted among the most famous of all on account of its
stubbornness. The child was matched against the parent; an
American vessel against a British, the latter far the
stronger. The combat was mainly between the Bonhomme
Richard, Jones' ship, with forty guns, many of them
unserviceable, and the British ship, Serapis, of superior
armament, as shown below.

John Paul Jones, commonly known as Paul Jones, was born in
Scotland in 1747, the son of John Paul, a gardener. He
emigrated to Virginia, and, assuming the name of Jones,
became first lieutenant (1775) in the American navy. When in
1778 France joined the colonies against England, Jones, who
had already performed several noteworthy exploits, was in
that country. Through the influence of Franklin an old
merchant vessel, the Due de Duras, was converted into a
ship-of-war and, with four others, placed under the command
of Jones. In honor of Franklin he named the Duras "Poor
Richard," and, in compliment to the French language and
people, she was called the Bonhomme Richard, the French
colloquial equivalent.

With a squadron of five ships, each except his own under a
French commander and three of them with French crews as
well, Jones sailed from L' Orient, France, August 14,1779.

He passed around the west coast of Ireland and around
Scotland. There was much discontent among the French
officers, and, though four of his ships were still with him
when he sighted the Baltic fleet, Jones could not count on
loyal service, especially from the Alliance, whose captain
had already shown much insubordination.

The memorable fight has never been better described than in
the following plain and direct account of Mackenzie,
himself an officer of the United States navy.

The battle between the Bonhomme and the Serapis is invested with a
heroic interest of the highest stamp. Jones had been cruising off the
mouth of the Humber and along the Yorkshire coast, intercepting the
colliers bound to London, many of which he destroyed (1779). On the
morning of September 23d he fell in with the Alliance. [27] This
rencounter was a real misfortune; as, in the battle which ensued, the
former disobedience and mad vagaries of Landais, her commander, were
about to be converted into absolute treason. The squadron now consisted

of the Richard, the Alliance, the Pallas, and the Vengeance.

About noon Jones despatched his second lieutenant, Henry Lunt, with
fifteen of his best men, to take possession of a brigantine which he had
chased ashore. Soon after, as the squadron was standing to the northward
toward Flamborough Head, with a light breeze from south-southwest,
chasing a ship, which was seen doubling the cape, in opening the view
beyond, they gradually came in sight of a fleet of forty-one sail
running down the coast from the northward, very close in with the land.

On questioning the pilot, the Commodore discovered that this was the
Baltic fleet, with which he had been so anxious to fall in, and that it
was under convoy of the Serapis, a new ship, of an improved
construction, mounting forty-four guns, and the Countess of Scarborough,
of twenty guns.

Signal was immediately made to form the line of battle, which the
Alliance, as usual, disregarded. The Richard crossed her royal yards,
and immediately gave chase to the northward, under all sail, to get
between the enemy and the land. At the same time signal of recall was
made to the pilot of the boat; but she did not return until after the
action. On discovering the American squadron, the headmost ships of the
convoy were seen to haul their wind suddenly and go about so as to
stretch back under the land toward Scarborough and place themselves
under cover of the cruisers; at the same time they fired signal-guns,
let fly their topgallant sheets, and showed every symptom of confusion
and alarm. Soon afterward the Serapis was seen reaching to windward to
get between the convoy and the American ships, which she soon effected.

At four o'clock the English cruisers were in sight from deck. The
Countess of Scarborough was standing out to join the Serapis, which was
lying-to for her, while the convoy continued to run for the fort, in
obedience to the signals displayed from the Serapis, which was also seen
to fire guns. At half-past five the two ships had joined company, when
the Serapis made sail by the wind; at six both vessels tacked, heading
up to the westward, across the bows of the Richard, so as to keep their
position between her and the convoy.

The opposing ships thus continued to approach each other slowly under
the light southwesterly air. The weather was beautifully serene, and the
breeze, being off the land, which was now close on board, produced no
ripple on the water, which lay still and peaceful, offering a fair field
to the combatants about to grapple in such deadly strife. The decks of
the opposing vessels were long since cleared for action, and ample
leisure remained for reflection, as the ships glided toward each other
at a rate but little in accordance with the impatience of the opponents.

From the projecting promontory of Flamborough Head, which was less than

a league distant, thousands of the inhabitants, whom the recent attempt
upon Leith had made aware of the character of the American ships, and
the reckless daring of their leader, looked down upon the scene,
awaiting the result with intense anxiety. The ships also were in sight
from Scarborough, the inhabitants of which thronged the piers. The sun
had already sunk behind the land before the ships were within gun-shot
of each other; but a full harvest-moon rising above the opposite
horizon, lighted the combatants in their search for each other, and
served to reveal the approaching scene to the spectators on the land
with a vague distinctness which rendered it only the more terrible.

We have seen that the Alliance had utterly disregarded the signal to
form the line of battle when the Baltic fleet was first discovered, and
our squadron bore down upon them. She stood for the enemy without
reference to her station, and, greatly out-sailing the other vessels,
was much sooner in a condition to engage. Captain Landais seemed for
once to be actuated by a chivalrous motive and likely to do something to
redeem the guilt of his disobedience. The officers of the Richard were
watching this new instance of eccentricity, for which Landais' past
conduct had not prepared them, with no little surprise; when after
getting near to where the Serapis lay, with her courses hauled up, and
St. George's ensign—the white cross of England—proudly displayed, he
suddenly hauled his wind, leaving the path of honor open to his
commander. While the Pallas stood for the Countess of Scarborough, the
Alliance sought a position in which she could contemplate the double
engagement without risk, as though her commander had been chosen umpire,
instead of being a party interested in the approaching battle. Soon
afterward the Serapis was seen to hoist the red ensign instead of St.

George's, and it was subsequently known that her captain had nailed it
to the flag-staff with his own hand.

About half-past seven the Bonhomme Richard hauled up her courses and
rounded-to on the weather or larboard quarter of the Serapis, and within
pistol-shot, and steered a nearly parallel course, though gradually
edging down upon her. The Serapis now triced up her lower-deck ports,
showing two complete batteries, besides her spar deck, lighted up for
action, and making a most formidable appearance. At this moment Captain
Pearson, her commander, hailed the Bonhomme Richard and demanded, "What
ship is that?" Answer was made, "I can't hear what you say." The hail
was repeated: "What ship is that? Answer immediately, or I shall be
under the necessity of firing into you!" A shot was fired in reply by
the Bonhomme Richard, which was instantly followed by a broadside from
each vessel. Two of the three old eighteen-pounders in the Richard's
gunroom burst at the first fire, spreading around an awful scene of
carnage. Jones immediately gave orders to close the lower-deck ports and

abandon that battery during the rest of the action.

The Richard, having kept her headway and becalmed the sails of the
Serapis, passed across her forefoot, when the Serapis, luffing across
the stern of the Richard, came up in turn on the weather or larboard
quarter; and, after an exchange of several broadsides from the fresh
batteries, which did great damage to the rotten sides of the Richard and
caused her to leak badly, the Serapis likewise becalmed the sails of the
Richard, passed ahead, and soon after bore up and attempted to cross her
forefoot so as to rake her from stem to stern.

Finding, however, that he had not room for the evolution, and that the
Richard would be on board of him, Captain Pearson put his helm a-lee,
which brought the two ships in a line ahead, and, the Serapis having
lost her headway by the attempted evolution, the Richard ran into her
weather or larboard quarter. While in this position, neither ship being
able to use her great guns, Jones attempted to board the Serapis, but
was repulsed, when Captain Pearson hailed him and asked, "Has your ship
struck?" to which he at once returned the immortal answer:

"_I have not yet begun to fight!_"

Jones now backed his topsails, and the sails of the Serapis remaining
full, the two ships separated. Immediately after, Pearson also laid his
topsails back, as he says in his official report, to get square with the
Richard again; Jones at the same instant filled away, which brought the
two ships once more broadside and broadside. As he had already suffered
greatly from the superior force of the Serapis, and from her being more
manageable and a faster sailer than the Richard, which had several times
given her the advantage in position, Jones now determined to lay his
ship athwart the enemy's hawse; he accordingly put his helm up, but,
some of his braces being shot away, his sails had not their full power,
and, the Serapis having sternway, the Richard fell on board of her
farther aft than Jones had intended. The Serapis' jib-boom hung her for
a few minutes, when, carrying away, the two ships swung broadside and
broadside, the muzzles of the guns touching each other. Jones sent Mr.
Stacy, the acting master, to pass up the end of a hawser to lash the two
ships together, and, while he was gone on this service, assisted with
his own hand in making fast the jib-stay of the Serapis to the Richard's
mizzen-mast.

Accident, however, unknown for the moment to either party, more
effectually secured the two vessels together; for, the anchor of the
Serapis having hooked the quarter of the Richard, the two ships lay
closely grappled. In order to escape from this close embrace, and

recover the advantage of his superior sailing and force. Captain Pearson
now let go an anchor, when the two ships tended round to the tide, which
was setting toward Scarborough. The Richard being held by the anchor of
the Serapis, and the yards being entangled fore and aft, they remained
firmly grappled. This happened about half-past eight, the engagement
having already continued an hour.

Meantime the firing had recommenced with fresh fury from the starboard
sides of both vessels. The guns of either ship actually touched the
sides of the other, and, some of them being opposite the ports, the
rammers entered those of the opposite ship when in the act of loading,
and the guns were discharged into the side or into the open decks. The
effect of this cannonade was terrible to both ships, and wherever it
could be kept up in one ship it was silenced in the other. Occasional
skirmishing with pikes and pistols took place through the ports, but
there does not appear to have been any concerted effort to board from
the lower decks of the Serapis, which had the advantage below.

The Richard had already received several eighteen-pound shot between
wind and water, causing her to leak badly; the main battery of
twelve-pounders was silenced; as for the gunroom battery of six
eighteen-pounders, we have seen that two out of the three starboard ones
burst at the first fire, killing most of their crews. During the whole
action but eight shots were fired from this heavy battery, the use of
which was so much favored by the smoothness of the water. The bursting
of these guns, and the destruction of the crew, with the partial blowing
up of the deck above, so early in the action, were discouraging
circumstances, which, with a less resolutely determined commander, might
well have been decisive of the fate of the battle.

Colonel Chamillard, who was stationed on the poop, with a party of
twenty marines, had already been driven from his post, with the loss of
a number of his men. The Alliance kept studiously aloof, and, hovering
about the Pallas and the Countess of Scarborough, until the latter
struck, after half an hour's action, Landais endeavored to get
information as to the force of the Serapis. He now ran down, under easy
sail, to where the Richard and Serapis grappled. At about half-past nine
he ranged up on the larboard quarter of the Richard, of course having
the Richard between him and the Serapis, though the brightness of the
moonlight, the greater height of the Richard, especially about the poop,
and the fact of her being painted entirely black, while the Serapis had
a yellow streak, could have left no doubt as to her identity; moreover,
the Richard displayed three lights at the larboard bow, gangway, and
stern, which was an appointed signal of recognition.

Landais now deliberately fired into the Richard's quarter, killing many
of her men. Standing on, he ranged past her larboard bow, where he
renewed his raking fire, with like fatal effect. To remove the chance of
misconception, many voices cried out that the Alliance was firing into
the wrong ship; still the raking fire continued from her. Captain
Pearson also suffered from this fire, as he states in his report to the
Admiralty, but necessarily in a much less degree than the Richard, which
lay between them. There is ample evidence of Landais having returned
there several times to fire on the Richard, and always on the larboard
side, or opposite one to that on which the Richard was grappled with the
Serapis.

While the fire of the Serapis was continued without intermission from
the whole of her lower-deck battery, the only guns that were still fired
from the Richard were two nine-pounders on the quarter-deck, commanded
by Mr. Mease, the purser. This officer having received a dangerous wound
in the head, Jones took his place, and, having collected a few men,
succeeded in shifting over one of the larboard guns; so that three guns
were now kept playing on the enemy, and these were all that were fired
from the Richard during the remainder of the action. One of these guns
was served with double-headed shot and directed at the main-mast, by
Jones' command, while the other two were loaded with grape and canister,
to clear the enemy's deck.

In this service great aid was rendered by the men stationed in the tops
of the Richard, who, having cleared the tops of the Serapis, committed
great havoc among the officers and crew upon her upper deck. Thus, the
action was carried on with decided advantage to the Serapis' men on the
lower decks, from which they might have boarded the Richard with a good
prospect of success, as nearly the whole crew of the latter had been
driven from below by the fire of the Serapis and had collected on the
upper deck. In addition to the destructive fire from the tops of the
Richard, great damage was done by the hand-grenades thrown from her tops
and yard-arms. The Serapis was set on fire as often as ten or twelve
times in various parts, and the conflagration was only with the greatest
exertions kept from becoming general.

About a quarter before ten a hand-grenade, thrown by one of the
Richard's men from the main-top of the Serapis, struck the combing of
the main-hatch, and, glancing inward upon the main deck, set fire to a
cartridge of powder. Owing to mismanagement and defective training, the
powder-boys on this deck had bought up the cartridges from the magazine
faster than they were used, and, instead of waiting for the loaders to
receive and charge them, had laid them on the deck, where some of them
were broken. The cartridge fired by the grenade now communicated to

these, and the explosion spread from the main-mast aft on the starboard
side, killing twenty men and disabling every man there stationed at the
guns, those who were not killed outright being left stripped of their
clothes and scorched frightfully.

At this conjuncture, being about ten o'clock, the gunner and the
carpenter of the Richard, who had been slightly wounded, became alarmed
at the quantity of water which entered the ship through the shot-holes
which she had received between wind and water, and which, by her
settling, had got below the surface. The carpenter expressed an
apprehension that she would speedily sink, which the gunner, mistaking
for an assertion that she was actually sinking, ran aft on the poop to
haul down the colors. Finding that the ensign was already down in
consequence of the staff having been shot away, the gunner set up the
cry, "Quarter! for God's sake, quarter! Our ship is sinking!" which he
continued until silenced by Jones, who threw at the recreant a pistol he
had just discharged at the enemy, which fractured his skull, and sent
him headlong down the hatchway. Captain Pearson, hearing the gunner's
cry, asked Jones if he called for quarter, to which, according to his
own words, he replied "in the most determined negative."

Captain Pearson now called away his boarders and sent them on board the
Richard, but, when they had reached her rail, they were met by Jones
himself, at the head of a party of pikemen, and driven back. They
immediately returned to their ship, followed by some of the Richard's
men, all of whom were cut off.

About the same time that the gunner set up his cry for quarter, the
master-at-arms, who had been in consultation with the gunner and the
carpenter in regard to the sinking condition of the ship, hearing the
cry for quarter, proceeded, without orders from Jones, and either from
treachery or the prompting of humane feelings, to release all the
prisoners, amounting to more than a hundred. One of these, being the
commander of the letter-of-marque Union, taken on August 31st, passed,
with generous self-devotion, through the lower ports of the Richard and
the Serapis, and, having reached the quarter-deck of the latter,
informed Captain Pearson that if he would hold out a little longer the
Richard must either strike or sink; he moreover informed him of the
large number of prisoners who had been released with himself, in order
to save their lives. Thus encouraged, the battle was renewed from the
Serapis with fresh ardor.

The situation of Jones at this moment was indeed hopeless beyond
anything that is recorded in the annals of naval warfare. In a sinking
ship, with a battery silenced everywhere, except where he himself

fought, more than a hundred prisoners at large in his ship, his consort,
the Alliance, sailing round and raking him deliberately, his superior
officers counselling surrender, while the inferior ones were setting up
disheartening cries of fire and sinking and calling loudly for
quarter—the chieftain still stood undismayed. He immediately ordered
the prisoners to the pumps, and took advantage of the panic they were
in, with regard to the reported sinking of the ship, to keep them from
conspiring to overcome the few efficient hands that remained of his
crew.

Meanwhile the action was continued with the three light quarter-deck
guns, under Jones' immediate inspection. In the moonlight, blended with
the flames that ascended the rigging of the Serapis, the yellow
main-mast presented a palpable mark, against which the guns were
directed with double-headed shot. Soon after ten o'clock the fire of the
Serapis began to slacken, and at half-past ten she struck.

Mr. Dale, the first lieutenant of the Richard, was now ordered on board
the Serapis to take charge of her. He was accompanied by Midshipman
Mayrant and a party of boarders. Mr. Mayrant was run through the thigh
with a boarding-pike as he touched the deck of the Serapis, and three of
the Richard's crew were killed, after the Serapis had struck, by some of
the crew of the latter who were ignorant of the surrender of their ship.

Lieutenant Dale found Captain Pearson on the quarter-deck, and told him
he was ordered to send him on board the Richard. It is a remarkable
evidence of the strange character of this engagement, and the doubt
which attended its result, that the first lieutenant of the Serapis, who
came upon deck at this moment, should have asked his commander whether
the ship alongside had struck. Lieutenant Dale immediately answered:

"No, sir; on the contrary, he has struck to us!"

The British lieutenant, like a true officer, then questioned his
commander, "Have you struck, sir?" Captain Pearson replied, "Yes, I
have!" The lieutenant replied, "I have nothing more to say," and was
about to return below, when Mr. Dale informed him that he must accompany
Captain Pearson on board the Richard. The lieutenant rejoined, "If you
will permit me to go below, I will silence the firing of the lower-deck
guns." This offer Mr. Dale very properly declined, and the two officers
went on board the Richard and surrendered themselves to Jones.

Pearson, who had risen, like Jones, from a humble station by his own
bravery, but who was as inferior officer to Jones in courtesy as he had
proved himself in obstinacy of resistance, evinced from the first a
characteristic surliness, which he maintained throughout the whole of

his intercourse with his victor. In surrendering he said that it was
painful for him to deliver up his sword to a man who had fought with a
halter around his neck. Jones did not forget himself, but replied with a
compliment, which, though addressed to Pearson, necessarily reverted to
himself, "Sir! you have fought like a hero, and I make no doubt but your
sovereign will reward you in a most ample manner."

As another evidence of the strange _melee_ which attended this
engagement, and of the discouraging circumstances under which the
Richard fought, it may be mentioned that eight or ten of her crew, who
were, of course, Englishmen, got into a boat, which was towing astern of
the Serapis, and escaped to Scarborough during the height of the
engagement. This defection, together with the absence of the second
lieutenant with fifteen of the best men, the loss of twenty-four men on
the coast of Ireland, added to the number who had been sent away in
prizes, reduced Jones' crew to a very small number, and greatly
diminished his chance of success, which was due at length solely to his
own indomitable courage.

Meantime the fire, which was still kept up from the lower-deck guns of
the Serapis, where the seamen were ignorant of the scene of surrender
which had taken place above, was arrested by an order from Lieutenant
Dale. The action had continued without cessation for three hours and a
half. When it at length ceased, Jones got his ship clear of the Serapis
and made sail. As the two separated, after being so long locked in
deadly struggle, the main-mast of the Serapis, which had been for some
time tottering, and which had only been sustained by the interlocking of
her yards with those of the Richard, went over the side with a
tremendous crash, carrying the mizzen-topmast with it. Soon after, the
Serapis cut her cable and followed the Richard.

The exertions of captors and captives were now necessary to extinguish
the flames which were raging furiously in both vessels. Its violence was
greatest in the Richard, where it had been communicated below from the
lower-deck guns of the Serapis. Every effort to subdue the flames seemed
for a time to be unavailing. In one place they were raging very near the
magazine, and Jones at length had all the powder taken out and brought
on deck, in readiness to be thrown overboard. In this work the officers
of the Serapis voluntarily assisted.

While the fire was raging in so terrifying a manner, the water was
entering the ship in many places. The rudder had been cut entirely
through, the transoms were driven in, and the rotten timbers of the old
ship, from the main-mast aft, were shattered and almost entirely
separated, as if the ship had been sawn through by ice; so much so that

Jones says that toward the close of the action the shot of the Serapis
passed completely through the Richard; and the stern-post and a few
timbers alone prevented the stern from falling down on the gunroom deck.
The water rushed in through all these apertures, so that at the close
of the action there were already five feet of water in the hold. The
spectacle which the old ship presented the following morning was
dreadful beyond description. Jones says in his official report: "A
person must have been eye-witness to form a just idea of the tremendous
scene of carnage, wreck, and ruin that everywhere appeared. Humanity
cannot but recoil from the prospect of such finished horror, and lament
that war should produce such fatal consequences."

Captain Pearson also notices, in his official letter to the Admiralty,

the dreadful spectacle the Richard presented. He says: "On my going on

board the Bonhomme Richard I found her to be in the greatest distress;

her counters and quarters on the lower deck entirely drove in, and the

whole of her lower-deck guns dismounted; she was also on fire in two

places, and six or seven feet of water in her hold, which kept

increasing all night and the next day till they were obliged to quit

her, and she sunk with a great number of her wounded people on board

her." The regret which he must, at any rate, have felt in surrendering,

must have been much augmented by these observations, and by what he must

have seen of the motley composition of the Richard's crew.

On the morning after the action a survey was held upon the "Poor
Richard," which was now, more than ever, entitled to her name. After a
deliberate examination, the carpenters and other surveying officers were
unanimously of opinion that the ship could not be kept afloat so as to
reach port, if the wind should increase. The task of removing the
wounded was now commenced, and completed in the course of the night and
following morning. The prisoners who had been taken in merchant-ships
were left until the wounded were all removed. Taking advantage of the
confusion, and of their superiority in numbers, they took possession of
the ship, and got her head in for the land, toward which the wind was
now blowing. A contest ensued, and, as the Englishmen had few arms, they
were speedily overcome. Two of them were shot dead, several wounded and
driven overboard, and thirteen of them got possession of a boat and
escaped to the shore.

Jones was very anxious to keep the Richard afloat, and, if possible, to
bring her into port, doubtless from the very justifiable vanity of
showing how desperately he had fought her. In order to effect this
object he kept the first lieutenant of the Pallas on board of her with a
party of men to work the pumps, having boats in waiting to remove them
in the event of her sinking. During the night of the 24th the wind had

freshened, and still continued to freshen on the morning of the 25th,
when all further efforts to save her were found unavailing. The water
was running in and out of her ports and swashing up her hatchways. About
nine o'clock it became necessary to abandon her, the water then being up
to the lower deck; an hour later, she rolled as if losing her balance,
and, settling forward, went down bows first, her stern and mizzen-mast
being last seen.

"A little after ten," says Jones in his report, "I saw, with
inexpressible grief, the last glimpse of the Bonhomme Richard." The
grief was a natural one, but, far from being destitute of consolation,
the closing scene of the "Poor Richard," like the death of Nelson on
board the Victory in the moment of winning a new title to the name, was
indeed a glorious one. Her shattered shell afforded an honorable
receptacle for the remains of the Americans who had fallen during the
action.

The Richard was called by Captain Pearson a forty-gun ship, while the
Serapis was stated by the pilot, who described her to Jones when she was
first made, to have been a forty-four. Jones and Dale also gave her the
same rate. The Richard, as we have seen, mounted six eighteen-pounders
in her gunroom on her berth deck, where port-holes had been opened near
the water; fourteen twelve, and fourteen nine-pounders on her main deck,
and eight six-pounders on her quarter-deck, gangways, and forecastle.

The weight of shot thrown by her at a single broadside would thus be two
hundred and twenty-five pounds. With regard to her crew, she started
from L'Orient with three hundred eighty men. She had manned several
prizes, which, with the desertion of the barge's crew on the coast of
Ireland, and the absence of those who went in pursuit under the master
and never returned, together with the fifteen men sent away in the
pilot-boat, under the second lieutenant, just before the action, and who
did not return until after it was over, reduced the crew, according to
Jones' statement, to three hundred forty men at its commencement.

This calculation seems a very fair one; for, by taking the statement of
those who had landed on the coast of Ireland, as given in a contemporary
English paper, at twenty-four, those who were absent in the pilot-boat
being sixteen in number, and allowing five of the nine prizes taken by
the Richard to have been manned from her, with average crews of five men
each, the total reduction from her original crew may be computed to be
seventy men. Eight or ten more escaped, during the action, in a boat
towing astern of the Serapis. To have had three hundred forty men at the
commencement of the action, as Jones states he had, he must have
obtained recruits from the crews of his prizes.

In the muster-roll of the Richard's crew in the battle, as given by Mr.
Sherburne from an official source, we find only two hundred twenty-seven
names. This can hardly have been complete; still the document is
interesting, inasmuch as it enumerates the killed and wounded by name,
there being forty-two killed and forty wounded. It also states the
country of most of the crew; by which it appears that there were
seventy-one Americans, fifty-seven acknowledged Englishmen, twenty-one
Portuguese, and the rest of the motley collection was made up of Swedes,
Norwegians, Irish, and East Indians. Many of those not named in this
imperfect muster-roll were probably Americans.

With regard to the Serapis, her battery consisted of twenty eighteens on
the lower gun-deck, twenty nines on the upper gun-deck, and ten sixes on
the quarter-deck and forecastle. She had two complete batteries, and her
construction was, in all respects, that of a line-of-battle ship. The
weight of shot thrown by her single broadside was three hundred pounds,
being seventy-five pounds more than that of the Richard. Her crew
consisted of three hundred twenty; all Englishmen except fifteen
Lascars; and as such, superior to the motley and partially disaffected
assemblage of the Richard. The superiority of the Serapis, in size and
weight, as well as efficiency of battery, was, moreover, greatly
increased by the strength of her construction. She was a new ship, built
expressly for a man-of-war, and equipped in the most complete manner by
the first of naval powers. The Richard was originally a merchantman,
worn out by long use and rotten from age. She was fitted, in a makeshift
manner, with whatever refuse guns and materials could be hastily
procured, at a small expense, from the limited means appropriated to her
armament.

The overwhelming superiority thus possessed by the Serapis was evident
in the action. Two of the three lower-deck guns of the Richard burst at
the first fire, scattering death on every side, while the guns of the
Serapis remained serviceable during the whole action, and their effect
on the decayed sides of the Richard was literally to tear her to pieces.

On the contrary, the few light guns which continued to be used in the
Richard, under the immediate direction of her commander, produced little
impression on the hull of the Serapis. They were usefully directed to
destroy her masts and clear her upper deck, which, with the aid of the
destructive and well-sustained fire from the tops, was eventually
effected. The achievement of the victory was, however, wholly and solely
due to the immovable courage of Paul Jones. The Richard was beaten more
than once; but the spirit of Jones could not be overcome. Captain
Pearson was a brave man, and well deserved the honor of knighthood which
awaited him on his arrival in England; but Paul Jones had a nature which
never could have yielded. Had Pearson been equally indomitable, the

Richard, if not boarded from below, would, at last, have gone down with
her colors still flying in proud defiance.

The wounded of the Serapis appear, by the surgeon's report accompanying
Captain Pearson's letter to the Admiralty, to have amounted to
seventy-five men, eight of whom died of their wounds. Of the wounded,
thirty-three are stated to have been "miserably scorched," doubtless by
the explosion of the cartridges on the main deck. Captain Pearson states
that there were many more, both killed and wounded, than appeared on the
list, but that he had been unable to ascertain their names. Jones gave
the number of wounded on board the Serapis as more than a hundred, and
the killed probably as numerous. The surviving prisoners, taken from the
Serapis and the Countess of Scarborough, amounted to three hundred
fifty; the whole number of prisoners, including those previously taken
from captured merchant-vessels, amounted to near five hundred.

During the engagement between the Richard and the Serapis, the Pallas,
commanded by Captain Cottineau, seems to have done her duty. She
engaged the Countess of Scarborough, and captured her after an hour's
close action. The Pallas was a frigate of thirty-two guns, and the
Countess of Scarborough a single-decked ship, mounting twenty
six-pounders. The Alliance, in the course of the night, also fired into
the Pallas and the Countess of Scarborough, while engaged, and killed
several of the Pallas' men. Subsequent to the engagement it was attested
by the mass of officers in the squadron that, about eight o'clock, the
Alliance raked the Bonhomme Richard with grape and cross-bar, killing a
number of men and dismounting several guns. He afterward made sail for
where the Pallas and the Scarborough were engaged, and after hovering
about until the latter struck, communicated by hailing with both
vessels, and then stood back to the Richard, and coming up on her
larboard quarter, about half-past nine, fired again into her; passing
along her larboard beam, he then luffed up on her lee bow, and renewed
his raking fire. It was proved that the Alliance never passed on the
larboard side of the Serapis, but always kept the Richard between her
and the enemy. The officers of the Richard were of opinion that Landais'
intention was to kill Jones and disable his ship, so as afterward to
have himself an easy victory over the Serapis. As it was, he
subsequently claimed the credit of the victory, on the plea of having
raked the Serapis. There can be little doubt that he was actuated by
jealous and treacherous feelings toward Jones, and by base cowardice.

The Vengeance also behaved badly; neither she nor the Alliance made any
prizes from among the fleet of merchantmen, and the whole escaped under
cover of Flamborough Head and the adjacent harbors. Lieutenant Henry
Lunt, who was absent in the pilot-boat with fifteen of the Richard's
best men, lay in sight of the Richard during the action, but "thought it

not prudent to go alongside in time of action." His conduct at least
involved a great error of judgment, which no doubt he lived to repent.

The conduct of Jones throughout this battle displayed great skill and
the noblest heroism. He carried his ship into action in the most gallant
style, and, while he commanded with ability, excited his followers by
his personal example. We find him, in the course of the action, himself
assisting to lash the ships together, aiding in the service of the only
battery from which a fire was still kept up, and, when the Serapis
attempted to board, rushing, pike in hand, to meet and repel the
assailants. No difficulties or perplexities seemed to appal him or
disturb his judgment, and his courage and skill were equalled by his
immovable self-composure. The achievement of this victory was solely due
to his brilliant display of all the qualities essential to the formation
of a great naval commander.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] The Alliance had deliberately separated from the squadron. As to
the other vessels, the Pallas was a French frigate weaker than the
Richard, but much stronger than the second English ship, which she
captured. The Vengeance was only a sloop of twelve guns, and took no
part in the contest.—ED.

LITERARY PUZZLES

by Matt Pierard

In this puzzle, all of the following clues regarding current books are given:

Subject: April 2019 debut non-fiction work on conspiracy theories by investigative reporter.
Definitions, syllable counts, and alphabetized first letter for each word.

Rearrange first letters to discover author and title.

DEFINITION

SYLLABLES

LETTER

Ethiopian city

5 A

Entertainer Julie

2A

Southern state

3 A

Computer logic system

3

B

Rose-like flower

4

C

Communion wafer

3

E

Sixth perception

5

E

Political fringe advocate

3

E

Narrative structure

2

F

Wading bird

2

1

Fish-like fossil

4

1

Traditional femininity

3

L

Side situation

3

L

Giant beast

4

L

Goal-oriented activity

2

M

Realistic interpretation in culture

4

N

Black magic

4

N

Nun-in-training

4

N

Giraffe relative

3

0

Male-dominated society

4

P

Parasitic fish

3

R

Lizard-like

4

R

Fat secretor

3

S

Exo-planetary region

3

U

In this next puzzle, the following clues are given:

Subject: Two famous literary friends go on a long journey, by the editor of a respected
journal.

Definitions, first letters

Rearrange first letters to discover author and title.

A

A Asian adding machine

A

AHound breed

A

AFIower or fish

A

ACocktail

A

ADeadly sin

D

[►Early photograph

G

ALecy of The Conners

L

A Cowboy rope

L

[►Greek islander

L

[►Rising

N

A Sinatra

N

ACaptain Nemo's sub

N

ADeadly plant

0

A Uppity

0

ABack of head

0

AAgamemnon's son

R

ACIassic Japanese film

R

A Mesh bag

S

^Sleepwalker

T

> Hebrew tome

T

"►Regional

U

ASoft palate section

V

a Southern state

Y

>Chinese river

Y

>Former Soviet property

z

>Biblical man

In this last puzzle, the following clues are given:

Subject: Autobiography of poet's harrowing youth, long-delayed from debut.
Definitions, syllables.

Rearrange first letters to discover author and title.

Personal epithet

3

Egg element

s

Flexible asbestos

4

Ass

Cute lil porcupine

3

Snob

6

Jacket adornment

3

Violet genus

2

Non-medical treatment

3

Public disgrace

3

Miss Ball

pa

Shakespearean swain

3

Lady's sleepwear

3

Nervously exhausted

GS

Bach's instrument

2

Bone disease

6

Saucy literature

3

Very hungry

3

Producing taste

3

Wry humorist

3

Early feminist

3

Turtle

3

Eccentric

3

Pee science

4

r

THE NATURALISTIC SCHOOL OF DANCING

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Dance, by Daniel Gregory Mason

The 'return to nature'; Isadora Duncan—Duncan's influence: Maud
Allan; Duncan's German followers—Modern music and the dance; the
Russian naturalists; Gliere's 'Chrisis'—Pictorial nationalism:

Ruth St. Denis—Modern Spanish dancers; ramifications of the
naturalistic idea.

I

During the last part of the past and the beginning of the present
century, when the outside world was ignorant of the existence of the
Russian ballet, circles of more serious-minded students of art began to
voice protest against the cult of skirt and fire dancers, jongleurs and
kickers, and the time was ripe for any movement that would bring relief
from the prevailing deterioration of such a noble art as dancing. Even
the general public grew bored of acrobatic performances and as during
every period of decadence There were a few teachers who consistently
resolved to impart to their pupils only what was good and beautiful
in dancing, whose voices, feeble as they sounded, were nevertheless
strong enough to carry weight and rescue their art from the deplorable
condition into which it had for the time fallen/ as a dancing critic
of that time aptly writes. One of the most ardent advocates of a new
classic art of dancing during this time was Mrs. Richard Hovey. In
all her teaching and preaching Mrs. Hovey based the principles of the
prospective style upon the plastic art of the ancient Greeks. She made
a vigorous propaganda for this in New York, Boston and California.
Whether directly or indirectly Miss Isadora Duncan, who had been
interested in initiating a reform of human life in its least details
of costume, of hygiene and of morals, felt the impulse of Mrs. Hovey's
propaganda and joined the worthy movement.

The fundamental principle of Mrs. Hovey's propaganda was the return
to nature. According to the theory of this new movement, dancing was
declared an expression of nature. Water, wind, birds and all forces
of nature are subject to a law of rhythm and gravity. Not the tricky,
broken lines, spinning whirls and toe gymnastics, but soft, curved
undulations of nature, are close to Mother Earth. Thus also man in
his normal life and savage state, moved rather in slow curves than in
quick broken lines. This, briefly, was the principal argument of the

few reformers who inspired Miss Duncan. Already Noverre and Petipa had
emphasized the fact that ancient Greek sculpture and Greek designs gave
the best ideas of graceful lines and pleasing human forms. But the
votaries of the new school explained that in a return to the natural
gesture of human life Greek art was the only logical criterion. Miss
Duncan in her essay, "The Dance/ says:

'To seek in nature the fairest forms and to find the movement which
expresses the soul of these forms—this is the art of the dancer. It is
from nature alone that the dancer must draw his inspirations, in the
same manner as the sculptor, with whom he has so many affinities. Rodin
has said: "To produce good sculpture it is not necessary to copy the
works of antiquity; it is necessary first of all to regard the works of
nature, and to see in those of the classics only the method by which
they have interpreted nature." Rodin is right; and in my art I have
by no means copied, as has been supposed, the figures of Greek vases,
friezes and paintings. From them I have learned to regard nature, and
when certain of my movements recall the gestures that are seen in works
of art, it is only because, like them, they are drawn from the grand
natural source.

'My inspiration has been drawn from trees, from waves, from clouds,
from the sympathies that exist between passion and the storm, between
gentleness and the soft breeze, and the like, and I always endeavor to
put into my movements a little of that divine continuity which gives to
the whole of nature its beauty and its life.'

Thus Miss Duncan started her career by interpreting natural qualities
by means of natural movements. 'I have closely studied the figured
documents of all ages and of all the great masters, but I have never
seen in them any representations of human beings walking on the
extremity of the toes or raising the leg higher than the head. These
ugly and false positions in no way express that state of unconscious
Dionysiac delirium which is necessary to the dancer. Moreover,
movements, just like harmonies in music, are not invented; they are
discovered,' writes Miss Duncan. To her the only mode of dancing is
barefoot. According to her 'the dancer must choose above all the
movements which express the strength, the health, the grace, the
nobility, the languor or the gravity of living things.' Gravity to Miss
Duncan is natural and right. A ballet dancer, a Pavlova, Nijinsky and
Karsavina, eager to defy the laws of gravity, is to her a freak.

Prince Serge Volkhonsky, who has been a conspicuous figure in the
Russian dance reform-movement, writes of Miss Duncan's school in
comparison with that of Jacques-Dalcroze: 'Her dance is a result

of personal temperament, his movements are the result of music;
she draws from herself, he draws from rhythm; her psychological
basis is subjective; his rhythmical basis is objective; and, in
order to characterize her in a few words, I may say Isadora is the
dancing "ego." This subjective psychological basis of Isadora's
art I find clearly emphasized by Mr. Levinsohn's words: "The
images or moods (_Stimmungen_) created in our mind by the rational
element—music—cannot be identical with every one, and therefore
cannot be compulsory. Just in that dissimilitude of moods and
uncompulsoriness of images resides the best criterion for the
appreciation of Isadora Duncan as a founder of a system. Her dance
is precisely not a system, cannot found what is called a 'school';
it needs another similar 'ego' to repeat her. And according to this
it seems quite incomprehensible that some people should see in Miss
Duncan's art 'a possibility for all of us being beautiful.' No, not at
all for all of us; for not every temperament, while embodying 'images
or moods' called forth by music, will necessarily create something
beautiful; one cannot raise the exceptional into rule. In order to be
certain of creating something beautiful, no matter whether in the moral
or the sesthetical domain, it is not in ourselves that we shall find
the law, but in subjecting ourselves to another principle which lives
outside of ourselves. For the plastic (choreographic), this principle
is Music. It is not instinct expressing itself under the influence
of music—which with every man is different, and only in few chosen
natures beautiful in itself—but the rhythm of music, which in every
given composition is an unchangeable element subjecting our 'ego.'

This is the basis of living plastic art. And in this respect Isadora's
art satisfies the double exigencies of the visible and the audible art
as little as the ballet. Her arms are certainly more rhythmical than
her legs, but as a whole we cannot call her rhythmical in the strict
sense of the word, and this appears especially in the slow movements:
her walk, so to speak, does not keep step with music; she often steps
on the weak part of the bar and often between the notes. In general
it is in the examples of slow tempo that the insufficiency of the
principle may be observed. The slower a tempo the more she 'mimics,'
and the farther, therefore, she strays from the music. If we look at
the impression on the spectators we shall see that all in the paces of
the quick tempos the movement must enter into closer connection with
the music; in cases of very minute divisions of the bar the simple
coincidence of the step with the first 'heavy' part already produces a
repeated design which makes ear and eye meet in one common perception.
If the representatives of that particular kind of dance were to realize
this they would endeavor to introduce into slow tempos the rhythmical
element instead of the mimic, which leads them out of the music and
converts the dance into a sort of acting during the music, a sort of

plastic melo-declamation/"

These critics have pointed out the subjective nature of Miss Duncan's
dance and her impatience of rules and formal technique. They believe
that because of these two qualities of her art it cannot be repeated,
except by 'another similar ego.' But as if in direct answer to these
charges come Miss Duncan's pupils. They are by no means highly selected
material or 'similar egos/ but each (among the more mature pupils)
is a beautiful and individual dancer. To each she has transmitted her
spirit; in each she has preserved the native personality. They are
the best evidence thus far obtained of the truth of Miss Duncan's
dictum of the 'possibility for all of us being beautiful.' Moreover we
must not suppose that Miss Duncan's contempt for _formal_ technique
is a contempt for technical ability. She herself is a marvellously
plastic and exact dancer, and she demands, ultimately, no less of
her pupils. The limited range of her technique, so often complained
of, is the deliberate result of her belief that the only movements
proper to the dance are the _natural_ movements of the human body.

She stakes the success of her art upon the proposition that these
movements alone are capable of the highest absolute and interpretive
beauty. As to the truth of this proposition each observer must judge
for himself from the results. Again, Miss Duncan does not always 'dance
the music' literally, note for note, according to the theory of the
Jacques-Dalcroze system. Her interpretation is frankly emotional and
subjective, but it does not pretend to transcend the music.

In further justice to her efforts we should consider Isadora Duncan
as much a prophet of a new movement, as a dancer of a new school. Her
influence has been more far-reaching in Russia than anywhere else.

She practically brought about a serious revolution among the Russian
dancers, of whom we shall speak in another chapter. She influenced
the art of dancing in Germany, France, Italy and England. She was the
striking contrast to all the deteriorated stage dances of the early
twentieth century in America. She has given a powerful impulse to all
dance reforms by counteracting the academic and time-worn views. She
is the indirect motive of the Diaghileff-Fokine break with the old
Russian ballet and their striving for new rules and ideas in the art
of dancing. To her is due the gradual increase of refined taste and
higher respect for the stage dance. Personally we have found that her
dances failed to tell the phonetic story of the music. Her selection
of the compositions of Gluck, Schubert, Chopin and Beethoven has not
been uniformly successful, since most of them were never meant by the
composer to be danced. Compositions of this kind lack the necessary
choreographic episodes and often even the plastic symbols. No genius,
we believe, could visualize the slow cadences and solemn images of any

symphonic music of those German classics, whose works have been the
choice of Miss Duncan. With a few exceptions, such as the _Moments
Musicals_ and some other pieces, we have never been able to grasp
the meaning of the phonetoplastic images of Isadora Duncan's dances.

[Illustration: Duncan]

II

It was only natural that Miss Duncan's laureated appearances in various
European cities quickly found followers and imitators. The best known
exponent of Duncan's naturalism has been Miss Maud Allan, a talented
Canadian girl, whose dancing in England has made her a special favorite
of the London audiences, before whom she first appeared in 1908. How
favorably she was received by the English audiences is evident from
the fact that the late King Edward invited her to dance for him at
Marienbad. Like Miss Duncan, Maud Allan has danced mostly barefoot, her
body slightly clothed in a loose Greek drapery. The most sensational
in Miss Allan's repertoire has been the 'Vision of Salome,' compiled
from passages from Richard Strauss' opera, in which she has tried to
give the impression of the ghastly Biblical tragedy by means of plastic
pantomime and dancing. Among her artistically successful dances has
been the Grieg _Peer Gynt_ suite, of which the London critics speak
as of 'a beautiful art of transposition.' 'The faithfulness with
which her movements follow the moods of the composer is probably only
fully realized by those who are musicians as well as connoisseurs of
dance. Her translation of music has not seldom the rare quality of
translations of being finer than the original, and there are not a few
who, when they hear again, unaccompanied, the music which her dancing
has ennobled, will be conscious of a sense of incompleteness and loss,'
writes an English dance authority of her art.

Isadora Duncan's naturalism has probably made the most powerful direct
impression upon German aspirants, first, through the school of dancing
of Isadora's sister, Elisabeth, and second, through the pretended
appeal to the moods by means of classic ideals, and yet requiring
comparatively little technique. Assiduously as a German student will
practice in order to acquire the most perfect technique for being
an artist, musician, singer or architect, he lacks the painstaking
persistency of a Russian, Hungarian, Bohemian or Spaniard in acquiring
a thorough technique for his dance. He is inclined to interpret music
by means of the most easily acquired technique, such as seemingly the
naturalistic school requires. For this very reason. Miss Duncan has
been the greatest dance genius for the Germans, as that is so clearly

to be seen in the excellent work of Brandenburg, _Der moderne Tanz_.
This book from the beginning to the end, written in a fine poetic
prose, is a eulogy of Duncan's naturalism, and an elaborate display
of the minutest pretty moves of the German exponents of the movement.
Among the praised geniuses of Brandenburg are the sisters Wiesenthal,
who attracted widespread attention in some of Max Reinhardt's
productions.

The sisters Wiesenthal, Elsa and Grete, were received with unparalleled
enthusiasm at home and in consequence made a tour abroad, on which
occasion one of them danced in New York. How little she impressed the
New York audience, can be judged from what one of the most favorable
critics wrote of her as having 'a pretty fluttering, tottering
marionette manner of her own.' Our impression is that the sisters
Wiesenthal proved most successful in the quaint, naive and simple
ensemble performances which they gave in Germany. They displayed
some excellent _ritartandos_ and a few successful _adagio_ figures.

One could see that their steps and arm twists were not a result of
systematic studies but of spontaneous impulses, since in repetitions of
the music there was no sign of a well trained art, the wing-like arms
of the first phrase being arabesque-like in the repetition, etc. They
showed that they possessed a poetic conception of the dance, but failed
to grasp and express its intrinsic meaning. They were rather poets
than dancers, rather actresses than designers in the choreographic
sense. Their acting often interfered with dancing and brought about an
unpleasant disharmony with the musical rhythm. They may have danced
better on other occasions, but what a number of impartial connoisseurs
of the dance saw of them stamps them as talented dilettantes rather
than accomplished artists of a school.

A girl who enjoyed a great reputation in Vienna, Munich and in other
German cities in the first decade of this century, but of whom was
heard nothing later, was Miss Gertrude Barrison, an Anglo-Viennese.

Her art was more clever and more in style with the principles of the
naturalistic than that of the sisters Wiesenthal. She won the ear of
Austria for the new message. With a certain assurance in the conviction
of her individuality, Miss Barrison treated her art with freedom
and loftiness. She enforced her personality more than her art upon
the spectators, and this was, to a great extent, the secret of her
phenomenal success.

The best of all the German dancers of this century thus far has been
Rita Sacchetto, a pretty Bavarian girl, who made her debut in Munich,
and was at once recognized as an artist of much talent. Though the
Berlin critics did not receive her with the enthusiasm that they had

shown to the Wiesenthals, she was by far the biggest artist of all.

Her slighter recognition was possibly due to her lighter style of work
and an unfavorable repertoire, lacking in music that was of timely
importance. This withholding of recognition has always been peculiar
to Berlin. Tired out by hundreds of aspiring virtuosi and artists of
every description, an average Berlin critic, like one of New York,
grows at the end of a season nervous in the presence of the vast
majority of mediocrities and press-agented celebrities, so that he is
likely to ignore or tear down the serious beginner, if her performance
coincides with his 'blue' moods. This is what probably happened to
Miss Sacchetto. The connoisseurs and authorities of other countries
who have seen her dances speak of them in highest terms as pretty and
exceedingly graceful exhibitions of poetic youthful soul. What has
become of Miss Sacchetto lately the writer has been unable to learn.

Ill

Though none of the above mentioned dancers of Germany has pretended
to be a follower of Miss Duncan, yet all belong to the new movement
that was brought into being by her persistent efforts. They all defy
the principle of the classic ballet, they all pretend to interpret
music in their 'plastic art/ as they have preferred to term the
dance. Traditionally the German music has been either inclined to
classic abstraction, or to strictly operatic lines. The spectacular
ballet of Richard Strauss, 'The Legend of Joseph/ belongs more to
pantomimic pageantries than a class of actual dance dramas, of which
we shall speak in another chapter. The music of a foreign school and
race is always lacking in that natural stimulating vigor that it
gives to those who are absolutely at home with racial peculiarities
choreographically. In this the Russians have been lately more fortunate
than other nations. A great number of talented young Russian composers
have written an immense amount of admirable dance music, ballets and
instrumental compositions that could be danced. They have an outspoken
rhythmic character, which is the first requirement of the dance. In
this the recent German composers have remained behind the Russians.
The compositions of Richard Strauss, Reger, Schonberg and the other
distinguished musical masters of modern Germany offer nothing that
would inspire a new school of the art of dancing. In the first place
they lack the instinct for rhythm, and in the second, they lack the
plastic sense so essential for the dance. This circumstance has been
most detrimental to those of the young German dancers who attempted to
follow the naturalistic movement.

How much better than the German Duncanites have been those of

Scandinavia, Finland and France in this direction is difficult to say
authentically, though they have had the advantage over the Germans, of
having at their disposal the works of some of the most talented young
composers of dance music. Grieg, Lange-Miiller, Svendsen and many others
have written music with strong rhythmic and choreographic images. But
superior to all the Scandinavian composers, in the modern dance music
or music that could be danced, are the Finns: Sibelius, Jaernefelt,

Melartin, Merikanto and Toiwo Kuula. Many of Sibelius's smaller
instrumental compositions offer excellent themes and music for dancing.

A few of them are real masterpieces of their kind. But the Finns have
shown up to this time little interest for the modern dance movements.

The Danes, Swedes and Norwegians have been more affected by the new
ideas that are connected with the stage, though none of them has shown
any marked achievement that would be known in wider circles. Ida
Santum, a young Scandinavian girl in New York, has given evidence of
some graceful plastic forms and idealized folk-dances. Thus far she has
not shown anything strikingly appealing to the audiences. Aino Akte's
Salome Dances are purely operatic and have no bearing upon our subject.

Among English and American girls who have followed the footsteps
of Miss Duncan are Gwendoline Valentine, Lady Constance
Stewart-Richardson, Beatrice Irvin, and a number of others, but the
writer has been unable to gather any sufficient data for critical
arguments.

Undoubtedly the most talented dancer of the naturalistic school whom we
have known among the Russians is Mile. Savinskaya of Moscow. In power
of expressing depth and subtlety of dramatic emotions Savinskaya is
supreme. She is an actress no less than a dancer. Her conception of
naturalistic dancing is so deeply rooted in her soul and temperament
that it often acts against the plastic rules and grace, often displayed
by the dancers for the sake of pleasing effects. Miss Duncan herself
strives to create moods by means of classic poses, but Savinskaya's
ideal is to express the plastic forms of music in her art. She is
romantically dramatic, more a tragedian than anything else. Her dance
in the graphically fascinating ballet _Chrisis_ by Reinhold Gliere, in
Moscow, revealed her as an artist of the first rank, and perhaps the
first thoroughly trained Duncanite whose technique and dramatic talent
rival with any _ballerina_, of the new school or the old.

Probably the lack of suitable music has been thus far the greatest
obstacle in the way of the naturalistic dancers, though they pretend to
find their ideals in the eighteenth and nineteenth century's classic
compositions. No doubt some of the old music can be aptly danced, such
as the light instrumental works of Grieg, Mozart, Chopin and Schumann,

but the proper music has yet to be composed. The phonetic thinking of
past music was involved, hazy in closed episodes and often disconnected
in structural form. There is one single theme of a poem in a whole
symphony. To illustrate this plastically is a physical impossibility.

Maud Allan's and Isadora Duncan's attempts to dance symphonies of
Beethoven and other classic idealists have been miserable failures.

Those who pretend to see in such dances any beauty and idea, are
ignorant of musical and choreographic principles.

To our knowledge Reinhold Gliere, the genial young Russian composer and
director of the Kieff Symphony Society, is the first successful musical
artist in the field of naturalistic ballets. His ballet _Chrisis_ y
based on an Egyptian story by Pierre Louis, is a rare masterpiece in
its line.

Though built on the style of the conventional ballets, its music is
meant for naturalistic interpretation and lacks all the _pirouette__,

_chassee_, and other semi-acrobatic ballet music forms. Like the
principles laid down by Delsarte and his followers, Gliere's music
'moves with the regular rhythm, the freedom, the equipoise, of nature
itself.' It has for the most part a slow ancient Egyptian measure,
breathing the air of the pleasant primitive era. It suggests the even
swing of the oar, the circular sweep of the sling, the rhythmic roar
of the river, and all such images that existed before our boasted
civilization. It gives a chance for the dancer of the naturalistic
school to display pretty poses, primitive gestures and 'sound' steps.

Like all Gliere's compositions this is exceedingly lyric, full of
charming old melodies and curved movements that occasionally call to
mind Schumann, Schubert and Chopin. The ballet begins with Chrisis in
the majestic valley of the Nile spinning cotton on a spinning-wheel,
which she stops when a soft music, coming from a far-away temple,
comes to her ears. It is the music of the morning-prayer. She prays,
dancing to the trees and the clouds. At this time Kise, another little
maiden, is passing with food for her parents and _Chrisis_ calls her.

They dance together and spin for a while. There is in the background
a sacred tree. _Chrisis_ approaches it in slow dance and utters her
secret wish. During this time Kise meets on the river shore a blind
musician carrying a lyre. He plays a gay dance to the girls, to which
they dance so exquisitely that phantom-like nymphs and fawns emerge
from the river, and stop to watch. Linally a shepherd, who has been
looking on from the top of the hill, becomes interested in the dance
and makes friends with the girls. There ensues a passionate love scene
and dramatic climax for the first act, _Chrisis_ going into a convent.

The second act takes place in an ancient convent, _Chrisis_ as a
dancing priestess. The last act takes place with _Chrisis_ as a courtly

lady with every luxury around her. It is a magnificent piece of work
musically and choreographically, and should find widespread appeal.

We may count as belonging to the naturalistic school of dancing the
exponents of idealized and imitative national dances, though they
do not belong among the Duncanites. Particularly we should mention
Ruth St. Denis, who is widely known through her skilled imitation and
idealization of the Oriental dances. As Isadora Duncan sought by the
ancient Greeks the ideal of her 'natural' dances, so Ruth St. Denis
attempted to find choreographic beauties in the art of the East. In
this she has been strikingly successful. Her Japanese dances can
be considered as real gems of the Orient in which she has made the
impression as if an exotic old print of the empire of the Mikado became
alive by a miracle, though it was in the Indian sacred dances that she
made her reputation. This is what a dance critic writes of her:

'Clad in a dress of vivid green spangled with gold, her wrists
and ankles encased in clattering silver bands, surrounded by the
swirling curves of a gauze veil, the dancer passed from the first
slow languorous movements into a vertiginous whirl of passionate
delirium. Alluring in every gesture, for once she threw asceticism
to the winds, and yet she succeeded in maintaining throughout that
difficult distinction between the voluptuous and the lascivious. The
mystic Dance of the Five Senses was a more artificial performance and
only in one passage kindled into the passion of the Nautch. As the
goddess Radha, she is dimly seen seated cross-legged behind the fretted
doors of her shrine. The priests of the temple beat gongs before the
idol and lay their offerings at her feet. Then the doors open, and
Radha descends from her pedestal to suffer the temptation of the five
senses. The fascination of each sense, suggested by a concrete object,
is shown forth in the series of dances. Jewels represent the desire
of the sight, of the hearing the music of bells, of the smell of the
scent of flower, of the taste of wine, and the sense of touch is fired
by a kiss. Her dancing was inspired by that intensity of sensuous
delight which is refined to its farthest limit probably only in the
women of the East. She rightly chose to illustrate the delicacy of the
perceptions not by abandon but by restraint. The dance of touch, in
which every bend of the arms and the body described the yearning for
the unattainable, was more freely imaginative in treatment. And in the
dance of taste there was one triumphant passage, when, having drained
the wine-cup to the dregs, she burst into a Dionysiac Nautch, which
raged ever more wildly until she fell prostrate under the maddening
influence of the good wine. Then by the expression of limbs and
features showing that the gratification of the senses leads to remorse
and despair, and that only in renunciation can the soul realize the

attainment of peace, she returns to her shrine and the doors close upon
the seated image, resigned and motionless. So she affirmed in choice
and explicit gesture the creed of Buddha.'

Very strange yet effective are the dances of Ruth St. Denis in which
she exhibits the marvellous twining and twisting art of her arms,
which act as if they had been some ghastly snakes. Her arms possess
an unusual elasticity and sinuous motion which cannot be seen better
displayed by real Oriental dancers. The hands, carrying on the first
and fourth finger two huge emerald rings, give the impression of
gleaming serpents' eyes. Miss St. Denis is apparently a better musician
than Miss Duncan, while in her poetic sense and in the sense of beauty
she remains behind. However, as a musician she is excellent, and always
acts in perfect rhythm with the composition. But unfortunately all
her dance music is just as little Oriental as Miss Duncan's is Greek.

Ruth St. Denis seemingly is ignorant of the numerous Russian Oriental
compositions which would suit her art a thousand times better than the
works of the Occidental classics. In justice to her efforts it must
be said that she is a thorough artist in spite of the fact that she
has never studied her dances in the East. Her slender tall figure and
semi-Oriental expression give her the semblance of an Indian Bayadere.
It has always impressed us that she minimizes her art by affected
manners and an air that lacks sincerity. We believe her to have very
great talent, but for some reason or other, she has failed to display
it fully.

IV

The modern Spanish dances as performed by Rosario Guerrero, La Otero
and La Carmencita, are in fact a perfected type of Spanish folk-dances.

The Kinneys write of them as follows: 'So gracious, so stately, so rich

in light and shade is the _Sevillanas_, that it alone gives play to

all the qualities needed to make a great artist. When, a few summers

ago, Rosario Guerrero charmed New York with her pantomime of "The Rose

and the Dagger," it was the first two _coplas_ of this movement-poem

that charmed the dagger away from the bandit. The same steps glorified

Carmencita in her day and Otero, now popular as a singer in

the opera in Paris. All three of these goddesses read into their

interpretation a powerful idea of majesty, which left it none the less

seductive.' It is clear that none but a Spaniard could perform the more

or less perfected folk-dances of the country. It requires a physique

with born talent and traditions to give the dance its proper fire and

brutal elegance.

[Illustration: Maud Allan

_After a painting by Otto Marcus_]

Havelock Ellis gives a graphic picture of the Spanish dance. 'One
of the characteristics of Spanish dancing/ he writes, 'lies in
its accompaniments, and particularly in the fact that under proper
conditions all the spectators are themselves performers. In flamenco
dancing, among an audience of the people, every one takes a part by
rhythmic clapping and stamping, and by the occasional prolonged "oles"
and other cries by which the dancer is encouraged or applauded. Thus
the dance is not the spectacle for the amusement of a languid and
passive public, as with us. It is rather the visible embodiment of an
emotion in which every spectator himself takes an active and helpful
part; it is, as it were, a vision evoked by the spectators themselves
and upborne on the continuous waves of rhythmical sound which they
generate. Thus it is that at the end of a dance an absolute silence
often falls, with no sound of applause; the relation of performer and
public has ceased to exist. So personal is this dancing that it may be
said that an animate association with the spectators is necessary for
its full manifestation. The finest Spanish dancing is at once killed or
degraded by the presence of an indifferent or unsympathetic public, and
that is probably why it cannot be transplanted but remains local.'

The naturalistic school of dancing is by no means an invention of
Isadora Duncan, though she has been one of its most persistent
preachers. The true psychological origin belongs to Delsarte, whose
method of poetic plasticism inspired Mrs. Hovey to give lessons and
lectures on the subject. It branched out like a tree. Every country
was interested in the new idea in its own way. America, having no
aesthetic traditions whatsoever, found the pioneers in Isadora Duncan
and Ruth St. Denis; Germany found hers in the sisters Wiesenthal, Miss
Rita Sacchetto and others; France, in Mme. Olga Desmond; Spain, in
the refined and talented folk-dancers; Russia, in the rise of a new
ballet, and so on. Like a magic message, the idea filled the air and
was inhaled by special minds. There was a strong argument in favor
of its development, and that argument was the spiritual yeast that
set the world into a ferment. The more it was opposed and fought the
more it spread and grew. The naturalistic dance has been thus far
more an awakening than a mature art. As such it is apt to be crude
and imperfect. There is no reason to fear that a fate like that which
befell the Skirt Dance may overtake the 'classical' dancing of the
naturalistic school. It has accomplished a great service in bringing
the audiences to realize that the argument of natural plasticism is
based on philosophical truth. Soon the ranks of those who believe

that 'natural' dancing is that which requires the least technique
will decrease in favor of those serious minded artists, who seek the
solution in technique plus talent. 'The theory that a dancer can ignore
with impunity the restrictions of technique, that she is bound to
please if only she is natural and happy and allows herself to follow
the momentary inspiration of the music and dances with the same gleeful
spontaneity as a child dancing to a barrel-organ is a doctrine as
seductive as it is fatal.' The future solution of the movement lies
in perfection of the technique and in grasping the deeper depths of
musical relation to the art of dancing.

'The chief value of reaction resides in its negative destructive
element,' says Prince Volkhonsky. 'If, for instance, we had never seen
the old ballet, with its stereotyped character, I do not think that the
appearance of Isadora Duncan would have called forth such enthusiasm.
In Isadora we greeted the deliverance. Yet in order to appreciate
liberty we must have felt the chains. She liberated, and her followers
seek to exploit that liberty.'

HYPOCRITE, MADMAN, FOOL, AND KNAVE

Project Gutenberg's The Mute Stones Speak, by Paul Lachlan MacKendrick

Roman historians branded the Julio-Claudian successors of
Augustus—Tiberius (A.D. 14-37), Caligula (37-41), Claudius (41-54)
and Nero (54-68)—as a hypocrite, a madman, a fool, and a knave. The
hypocrite spent millions rehabilitating Asia Minor after an earthquake,
the madman provided Ostia with a splendid aqueduct, the fool built for
the same city a great artificial harbor, the knave rebuilt Rome—after
burning it down first, his enemies said—with a new and intelligent
city plan. But it would be easy to interpret the Julio-Claudian age
as one of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste: there were
many who fiddled before Rome ever burned. Thus both Tiberius and
Caligula built on the Palatine grandiose palaces, and Nero's Golden
House, as we shall see, outdid them all. Tiberius' monstrous barracks
at the city wall for the praetorian guard introduces a sinister note.
Claudius' Altar of Piety, modelled on Augustus' Altar of Peace,
shows how derivative official art can be. Out of the complexity of
this half-century, as archaeology reveals it to us, I have chosen
four examples, one from each reign: a stately pleasure-dome of
Tiberius by the sea at Sperlonga; a pair of extraordinary houseboats,
probably Caligula's, from the Lake of Nemi; the curious subterranean
basilica at the Porta Maggiore in Rome, which flourished briefly and

mysteriously in the reign of Claudius; and Nero's fabulous Golden House.

k k k k k

In August, 1957, road improvements near Sperlonga, on the coast,
about sixty-six miles southeast of Rome, offered G. Iacopi of the
Terme Museum the opportunity for partially restoring, and closely
examining, the ruins of a well-known villa there, commonly called the
Villa of Tiberius. Making soundings near the villa in a wide, lofty
cave fronting on the beach (Fig. 7.1), partly filled with sea-water,

Iacopi discovered that the natural cave had been made over into a
__nymphaeum_ or _vivarium_, a round artificial fish-pool, with a large
pedestal for statuary in the middle, and artificial grottoes opening
behind (Fig. 7.2). In the pool and the grottoes, buried under masses of
fallen rock, Iacopi and his assistants found an enormous quantity—at
last accounts over 5500 fragments—of statuary. The fallen rock gave
a clue for dating at least one phase of the cave's existence, and a
possible confirmation of the popular name for the adjoining villa. For
the historian Tacitus mentions that in A.D. 26, Tiberius, dining in a
natural cave at his villa at Spelunca, was saved from being crushed
under falling rock by the heroism of his prefect of the praetorian
guard, Sejanus, who protected him with his own body. This is very
likely the actual cave which Iacopi explored, though his discoveries
suggest that there were additions after Tiberius' time.

The exploration was carried on under difficulties of several kinds. The
Italian budget for archaeology is notoriously inadequate; the cave was
subject to flooding from springs, and lashing by winter storms; and
it contained a dangerous quantity of ammunition and explosives stored
there in World War II. The first difficulty was temporarily overcome by
the generosity of the engineer in charge of the road-building nearby;
the second by installing three pumps and building a dike; the third by
keeping an ordnance expert constantly on duty.

When the finds from the cave were first reported in the press, great
excitement was caused by the announcement—premature, as it turned
out—that among the fragments of sculpture were some resembling the
Laocoon group. The original Laocoon group had been described by Pliny
the Elder as carved out of a single block, probably with the sculptors'
names on the base, whereas the famous Vatican Laocoon is not monolithic
and is unsigned. Among the Sperlonga finds, on the other hand, were
fragments of a Greek inscription giving the names of the three Rhodian
sculptors mentioned by Pliny (but not in the precise form transcribed
by him: in the Sperlonga inscriptions, their fathers' names are
recorded, in Pliny not), plus some colossal pieces (the central figure

would have been nineteen feet eight inches tall) including parts of
two snake-like monsters, presumably the serpents sent by Athena to
punish Laocoon and his sons for resisting the proposal to drag the
Wooden Horse within the walls of Troy. This great group, much larger,
earlier (according to Iacopi, on the somewhat doubtful evidence of the
letter-styles of the Greek inscription, which he would date in the
second or first century B.C.) than the Vatican version, and different
in conception, fits the pedestal in the middle of the circular pool.

Another inscription goes some way to explain both the quantity and
the arrangement of the sculpture in the grotto. In ten lines of Latin
verse it describes how a certain Faustinus adorned the cave with
sculpture for the pleasure of his Imperial masters, choosing subjects
which, Vergil himself would admit, outdid his own poetry. One of the
subjects mentioned is Scylla, the fabulous cave-dwelling sea-monster,
with a girdle of dogs' heads about her loins, who guarded the straits
of Messina. Now in the cave, carved in the living rock, at the right
of the entrance, is the prow of a ship, set with blue, green, yellow,
and red mosaic, and presenting some evidence of having once had a
marble superstructure. To this ship Iacopi would assign some of his
key figures: a bearded Ulysses in a seaman's cap, his face expressing
horror; a lovely archaic statuette of Athena (Fig. 7.3), grasped by
a huge hand (Athena might be the figurehead); Scylla's gigantic hand
seizing a seaman by the hair, and a terrified mariner who has taken
refuge from Scylla at the ship's prow. A niche carved in the rock above
the ship would be an appropriate vantage-point for Scylla herself; in
one fragment one of her dog's heads has bitten deep into a sailor's
shoulder. It is true that the mosaic names the ship _Argo_, but Iacopi
explains this as a generic name for a ship, not necessarily referring
to the one that bore the Argonauts.

If Iacopi is right about this group, it was a baroque or even rococo
effect that Faustinus arranged for his Imperial masters. But the
Laocoon and Scylla groups by no means exhausted his fancy or his
pocketbook: there was Menelaus with the body of Patroclus, Ganymede
borne to heaven by an eagle (carved so as to be seen to best effect
from below, and therefore possibly belonging to a pedimental treatment
of the cave facade). There are heads of gods and heroes, satyrs and
fauns, a charming Cupid trying on a satyr's mask, a delightful head
of a baby with ringlets over the ears—all in the fanciful, complex,
sometimes tortured baroque style of Hellenistic Pergamum and Rhodes.
These are all of fine crystalline Greek island marble, so that they may
be Greek originals. The soapy native Carrara stone is normally used in
Roman copies—and in too much modern American church sculpture.

At the present writing the Sperlonga cave cannot be said to have
yielded up all its secrets. It is not even certain that the equipping
of Tiberius' outdoor dining-room as a lavish baroque museum took
place in Tiberius' lifetime, for the donor, Faustinus, may be the
rich villa-owner of that name who was a friend of the poet Martial,
and therefore of Domitianic date. The residents of Sperlonga want
the sculpture kept where it was found, to entice tourists; the
archaeologists want to take it to Rome for analysis and reconstruction.
Meanwhile, definitive conclusions are impossible. But one thing
is certain: the bizarre taste of the place, whether Tiberius' or
Domitian's, is characteristic of the first century of the Empire, and
reflects the gap between the ostentatious rich and the church-mouse
poor which was one day to contribute to the Empire's fall.

it it it it it

The same fantastic extravagance marks our next finds. Seventeen miles
southeast of Rome, cupped in green volcanic hills, lies the beautiful
deep blue Lake of Nemi, the mirror of Diana. Here divers, as long ago
as 1446, reported, lying on the bottom in from sixteen to sixty-nine
feet of water, two ships, presumably ancient Roman. A descent was made
in a diving bell in 1535. Another attempt in 1827 used a large raft
with hoists and grappling irons, and an art dealer tried again in 1895,
but all three efforts were chiefly successful in damaging the hulls,
tearing away great chunks without being able to raise the Ships to the
surface. The 1895 attempt did, however, produce a mass of tantalizing
fragments (Fig. 7.4): beams; lead water-pipe; ball-bearings; a number
of objects in bronze, including animal heads holding rings in their
teeth, a Medusa, and a large flat hand; terracotta revetment plaques, a
quantity of rails and spikes, and a large piece of decking in mosaic.

This treasure-trove, displayed in the Terme Museum, naturally whetted
appetites, not least Mussolini's. He determined to get at the ships by
lowering the level of the lake, a colossal task undertaken eagerly by
civil and naval engineers enthusiastic about classical civilization.

The job was made easier, but no less expensive, because there existed
an ancient artificial outlet, a tunnel a mile long, dating from the
reign of Claudius, which could be used to carry off the overflow. The
pumps were started on October 20,1928, in the presence of the _Duce_.
After various vicissitudes over a space of four years, the lake level
was lowered seventy-two feet, and by November, 1932, the first ship
was installed in a hangar on the shore, and the second (Fig. 7.5) lay
exposed in the mud.

The ships proved to be enormous by ancient standards, of very shallow
draft, very broad in the beam (one was sixty-six feet wide, the other

seventy-eight) and respectively 234 and 239 feet long (Fig. 7.6). They
were larger than some of the early Atlantic liners. Their 1100 tons
burden gave them ten times the tonnage of Columbus' largest ship.

The task of freeing the ships of mud and debris, recording the finds
level by level, reinforcing the hulls with iron, shoring them up,
raising and transporting them to the special museum built for them
on the lake shore proved in its way to be as great a challenge to
Italian patience and ingenuity as the job of excavating the slabs and
fragments of the Altar of Peace from under the Palazzo Fiano. There was
always the danger of the ships' settling in the mud in a convex curve,
springing the beams. The excavating tools used were made entirely of
wood; iron would have damaged the ancient timbers. As each section
of the hull emerged from the water that had covered it for so many
centuries, it was covered with wet canvas to keep it from deteriorating.

The hulls proved to be full of flat tiles set in mortar. These overlaid
the oak decking, and over these again was a pavement in polychrome
marble and mosaic. Fluted marble columns were found in the second
ship, suggesting a rich and heavy superstructure (Fig. 7.7). A round
pine timber from the first ship, thirty-seven feet long and sixteen
inches in diameter, with a bronze cap ornamented with a lion holding
a ring in its teeth, proved to be a sweep rudder, one of a pair. It
showed that these enormously heavy vessels (the decking material alone
must have weighed 600 or 700 metric tons) were actually intended to be
practicable, and to move about in the waters of the lake.

Clay tubes, flanged like sewer-pipe to fit into each other, were
arranged in pairs to make an air-space between one level of deck
and another. This suggests radiant or hypocaust heating, as in a
Roman bath: these floating palaces, or temples, or whatever they
were—perhaps both—had bathing facilities. Wooden shutters warrant the
inference that the ships were provided with private cabins. A length
of lead water-pipe stamped with the name of Caligula has been used to
date the ships to that reign (and indeed in some ways they accord well
with Caligula's reputation for madness), but of course there is nothing
to prevent lead pipe of Caligula's short reign (A.D. 37-41) from being
used in Claudius', and many scholars, on the evidence of the art
objects found, would date the ships in the latter reign.

Boards in the bottom of the hold were removable to facilitate cleaning
out the bilge. This was done with an endless belt of buckets, some of
which were found, and are on display, restored, in the museum. Over the
ribs of the hull was pine planking, then a thin coating of plaster,
then a layer of wool treated with tar or pitch, finally lead sheathing

clinched with large-headed copper nails.

The second ship had outriggers supporting a platform for the oarsmen,
and a bronze taffrail decorated with herms—miniature busts tapering
into square shafts. A number of mechanical devices of great technical
interest was found: pump-pistons; pulleys; wooden platforms (use
unknown), one mounted on ball-bearings, another on roller-bearings; a
double-action bronze stem-valve (perhaps for use in pumping out the
bilge), which had been welded at a high temperature (1800° Fahrenheit);
anchors, one with the knot tied by a Roman sailor still intact,
another with a moveable stock, anticipating by over 1800 years a
similar model patented by the British Admiralty in 1851. Its use is to
cant the anchor, giving it a better bite in the mud.

In 1944 the retreating Germans wantonly burned the ships in their
museum. Their gear, stored in a safe place, survived. From careful
drawings made at the time the ships were raised, models were made to
one-fifth scale. They are now on display in the restored museum.

The ships did not contain within themselves clear evidence about
what they were used for. Whether they had some religious purpose
in connection with the nearby Temple of Diana, or were used as
pleasure-craft, or both, they reflect, like the cave at Sperlonga, the
mad extravagance which increasingly characterized the Roman Empire on
its road to absolutism.

* * * Jc *

In 1917, on Rome's birthday, April 21, a landslip beside the
Rome-Naples railway line outside the Porta Maggiore revealed, forty-two
feet beneath the tracks, a hitherto unsuspected and most remarkable
underground, vaulted, stucco-ornamented room, the so-called "basilica,"
which will serve as a third example of archaeology's contribution
to our knowledge of the Julio-Claudian age. To protect the basilica
against damage from seepage and vibration from trains—240 a day
pass directly above it—it was enclosed in 1951-52, at a cost of
over $500,000, in a great box of waterproof reinforced concrete with
footings anchored nearly twenty-four feet beneath the level of the
basilica pavement.

One entered the chamber in antiquity—it was always underground—down
long vaulted ramp which made a right-angle turn and emerged in a little
square vestibule, whose skylight provided the basilica's only natural
light. Beyond the vestibule was a vaulted nave (Fig. 7.8) ending in
an apse, and two side aisles. The profiles of the piers upholding the

vaults, and of the arches connecting the nave with the side aisles,
are irregular; and the piers are set at eccentric angles (Fig. 7.9):
this suggests a curious method of construction. A trench must have been
dug through the surface tufa corresponding to the desired perimeter
of the building. Then six square pits were dug, one for each pier,
and the outline of the arches and doorways formed in the virgin soil.
Then mortar was poured in. When it had set, the entrance corridor was
dug and the interior of the basilica emptied of earth through the
skylight in the vestibule. Then vault, piers, and walls were stuccoed.

In the late Republic and after, Roman artisans showed great skill in
ornamental stucco-work, a far cry from the wattle-and-daub, in the
primitive huts, which is the remote ancestor of the refined work in the
basilica, and a symbol of how far on the road to sophistication Rome
had traveled from her humble beginnings.

In the basilica the stucco-work is divided by moldings into squares,
rectangles, and lozenges, filled with figures in low relief of great
delicacy and elegance. Some are simple scenes of daily life, and many
others are part of the standard repertory of Roman art, but the key
motifs will bear, as we shall see, a single, serious interpretation.

The apse, the focal point of the whole structure, was reserved for a
special scene of central importance.

The central panel of the central vault shows a naked human figure, a
pitcher in his hand, carried off by a winged creature. (The interior
of the figure is eaten out; this is due not to vandalism but to the
depredations of a parasitic insect related to the termite.) In the
four surrounding panels are four other motifs. A hero wearing a lion's
skin shoots with a bow a monster guarding a maiden chained to a rock.
A beautiful, seated, half-naked woman cradles a statuette in her left
arm; a bearded middle-aged man stands before her. A young man in a
short tunic, carrying a leafy branch or a shepherd's crook, leads off a
woman by the hand. A veiled female figure takes from a tree guarded by
a serpent a fleecy object to give to a man kneeling on a table nearby.

How are these scenes to be interpreted? Do they share a common motif?
According to the French Professor Jerome Carcopino, they do.

The central subject is Ganymede borne heavenward to be Jupiter's cup
bearer. The hero with the lion's skin is Hercules rescuing Hesione.

The woman with the statuette is Helen with the Palladium, the ancient
image on which Troy's safety depended; the wise Ulysses stands before
her. Or it might be Iphigenia, in faraway Tauris, about to bear past
the Thracian King Thoas the statuette of Artemis which will release her
brother Orestes from torment by the Furies. In the next panel, if the
young man is carrying a branch, he is Orpheus bringing Eurydice back

from Hades; if he is carrying a shepherd's crook, he is Paris kidnaping
Helen. The veiled female is of course Medea getting the Golden Fleece
for Jason. The common theme is deliverance. Ganymede, liberated from
earthly ties, is borne on wings to the bliss of Heaven. Hercules can
free Hesione because, according to some versions of the myth, he has
been initiated into the mysteries. The statue, whether of Athena or of
Artemis, guarantees the safety of the city or person who possesses it.

Helen, in some accounts, can read the future and assuage men's pain;
or, if the theme is Orpheus and Eurydice we may recall that in an early
version of the myth the ending was happy. Jason and Medea are freed
from fear of the dragon through rites of magic initiation.

Does the great scene in the apse (Fig. 7.10) harmonize with the
interpretation? In it, on the right, a graceful veiled woman, holding
the lyre of a poetess, descends a cliff into the sea. She is pushed
by a baby winged figure standing behind her. Beneath, waist deep in
the water, a figure with a cloak outspread stands ready to receive
her and escort her to the opposite shore. There, on another cliff,
stands an imposing naked male figure, in his left hand a bow, his right
outstretched in blessing. Behind him sits a young man thoughtfully
supporting his head on his hand. Below in the sea yet another figure
holds an oar and blows a horn in greeting. Any Roman intellectual would
recognize the scene: it is Sappho, encouraged by Cupid, received by
Tritons, blessed by Apollo, making the lover's leap to join her beloved
Phaon for eternity. This is not suicide, but liberation from earthly
love into an eternity of perfect harmony of the senses with the sublime
and the supernatural. The scene is consistent with the others, and
provides a further clue to the interpretation of the whole, for Pliny
the Elder, in his encyclopaedic _Natural History says that the myth
of Sappho and Phaon was made much of by a sect called neo-Pythagoreans,
inspired by the number-mysticism, and the belief in immortality, of
their founder, Pythagoras of Samos, who flourished in the late sixth
century B.C. These beliefs were refined in the Hellenistic Age, and
taken up by heterodox Roman intellectuals.

This elegant underground chamber, so restrained and literary in decor,
so small in size (it measures less than thirty by thirty-six feet) is
just the place for a chapel for such an elite and aristocratic sect
of ancient freemasons. The hypothesis is borne out by the discovery
beneath the floor of the bones of a puppy and a suckling pig, the
preferred _pieces de resistance_ for a neo-Pythagorean cult meal,
perhaps the meal that inaugurated the chapel.

And still other motifs in the stucco decoration strengthen the
hypothesis, by stressing redemption, salvation, initiation: a winged

victory; a soul arriving in the Isles of the Blest; a woman with a
flower, symbolizing Hope; a scene of Demeter, the earth goddess, and
Triptolemus, the hero of agriculture, of whom much was made in the
Eleusinian mysteries. Other reliefs show the reverse of the coin: the
punishment of the uninitiate. The satyr Marsyas is flayed alive for
presuming to challenge Apollo to a competition in music. The Danaids,
for the crime of murdering their husbands, perform forever the useless
labor of drawing water in perforated jars. There are other sinners:

Medea with her slain sons; Pasiphae, the monstrously adulterous Cretan
queen; Phaedra, trying her wiles on her sinless stepson; Hippolytus,
over-chaste votary of the maiden-goddess Artemis; King Pentheus
murdered, for scoffing at the Dionysiac mysteries; his mother, Agave,
carries his severed head aloft in Bacchic frenzy. To these has not been
given the true neo-Pythagorean vision of the truth; they are portrayed
here to symbolize their doom to a private Hell of their own making.

Two long panels on either side of the spring of the central vault
reinforce the general intellectual tone. In one, schoolboys recite
their lessons before a seated schoolmaster with a ferule in his hand.

In the other, the Muse of Tragedy attends the coming-of-age ceremony of
a Roman adolescent. (Some interpret this scene as a marriage; if so,
the sect will have allegorized it in some way.) We know that the sect
was open to both sexes; reliefs in the wall-panels of the basilica show
men and women making offerings.

The stuccoes of the vault were in excellent condition when found.

(They have since suffered from dampness, now being corrected by
air-conditioning.) Also, they show no traces of addition or repairs,
but the wall-panels were desecrated in antiquity by vandals, the
consoles for offerings ripped off, the lamps and chapel gear carried
away. It looks as though the chapel had had a short life, and the cult
a violent end. Will history provide a date? Tacitus mentions in his
_Annals_ a rich Roman, Titus Statilius Taurus, known to have owned
property near the basilica, who fell foul of Claudius, was accused
of practicing _magicas superstitiones_, and escaped his sentence by
committing suicide in A.D. 53. The style of the stuccoes fits this
date, the decor of the basilica fits the cult, its state when found
fits Tacitus' story. We may suppose that everything within reach was
looted, the chamber filled in, and probably never seen again until the
spring day 1864 years later when the landslide by the railway revealed
its existence.

it it it it it

In 1907 the German archaeologist F. Weege, following in the footsteps

of Renaissance explorers of 1488, made his way through a hole in the
wall of the Baths of Trajan, near the Coliseum, to find himself in a
labyrinth of underground vaulted corridors and rooms partly filled with
rubble, which had once been part of an Imperial palace, the Golden
House of Nero. Setting lighted candles at every turning to guide his
way back, he explored as many as he could of the eighty-eight rooms of
this small part of the palace-complex, sometimes crawling with lighted
candle over rubble that filled a room nearly to the vault, while
spiders and centipedes, and other nameless creatures scuttled away from
him into the darkness.

The rooms had been filled with rubble by Trajan, with a twofold
purpose: to make a firm substructure for his baths, and to continue
the work of the Flavians in damning the memory of the conspicuous
consumption and conspicuous waste of the hated Nero. Thirteen
hundred and eighty-four years later, when the underground rooms were
rediscovered, among the visitors was Raphael, who decorated a loggia
in the Vatican Palace in the style of the fantastic paintings on
Nero's walls. Since the buried rooms were grottoes, the paintings
were "grotesques"—as often, the word has survived, while its history
has been forgotten. Other visitors were Caravaggio, Velasquez,
Michelangelo, and Raphael's teacher, Perugino. The names of many a
famous artist are scrawled right across the face of the ornaments of
the vaults. An Italian poem, written not long after the discovery of
America, speaks of artists' underground picnics in the Golden House.

The picnickers crawled on their bellies to enjoy their subterranean
meal of bread, ham, apples, and wine.

The result of Weege's more scientific investigation was the working out
of a new plan. The western half of the complex (Fig. 7.11) proved to
be conventional, with the rooms grouped about a peristyle with garden
and fountain. Rooms 37 and 43 have alcoves: it is easy to imagine them
as the Imperial bedchambers of Nero and his beautiful red-haired wife
Poppaea. In Nero's bedchamber were hung the 1808 gold crowns he won in
athletic competitions in Greece, if competitions they can be called,
when all the prizes were awarded to Nero in advance, and armed guards
drove off all would-be rivals.

The eastern wing (Fig. 7.12) is more unorthodox in plan, and more
interesting. The main approach opened into Room 60, the Hall of the
Gilded Vault, so called from the ornate painted stucco ceiling,
divided into round and rectangular fields in gilt, green, red and
blue, depicting mythological and erotic scenes, very different in tone
from the restraint of the subterranean basilica. Hippolytus, off to
the hunt, receives a letter containing incestuous proposals from his

stepmother Phaedra. Satyrs rape nymphs, Venus languishes in the arms of
Mars, Cupid rides in a chariot drawn by panthers. And yet we are told
that the painting in this pleasure dome was done by the solemn dean of
Roman artists, Fabullus himself, the John Singer Sargent of his day,
who always painted in full dress, wearing his toga.

Room 70 is a vaulted corridor 227 feet long, with sixteen windows
opening to the north in the impost of the vault, which is painted
sky-blue as a _trompe d'oeil_. Seabeasts, candelabra, and arabesques,
sphinxes with shrubs growing out of their backs, griffins, centaurs,
acanthus-leaves, Cupids, gorgons' heads, lions' heads with rings in
their mouths, dolphins holding horns of plenty, winged horses, eagles,
tritons, swags of flowers make up the riotous decor. In recesses
in the walls landscapes and seascapes, impressionistically painted,
attempt the illusion of the out-of-doors. Halfway down the corridor the
vault is lowered. Here it supported a ramp which led to the gardens
above.

Room 84 is octagonal, lighted by a hole in the roof, anticipating, as
we shall see, Hadrian's Pantheon. Perhaps this was the state dining
room, described by ancient sources as hung on an axis and revolving
like the world. Its ivory ceilings slid back and dropped flowers and
perfumes on Nero's guests.

The most controversial room of all is the apsidal number 80, decorated
with scenes from the Trojan war: Hector and Andromache, Paris and
Helen, Thetis bringing Achilles his shield. Nero was fascinated by the
Trojan War: it was an epic of his own composition on the fall of Troy
that he recited as Rome was burning. What was in the apse? Equivocal
Renaissance reports place the finding of the Vatican Laocoon somewhere
in this area, the apse is of a size to fit the statue, and the subject
is appropriate to a room full of Trojan motifs. The statue's baroque
quality would have appealed strongly to Nero's taste. This is the
circumstantial evidence for room 80 as the findspot of one of the most
notorious statues of antiquity. That this survey of the Julio-Claudian
age should approach its end, as it began, with mention of the Laocoon,
suggests how conventional was the repertory of Roman taste.

But a description of the rooms of the Golden House is not quite the
whole story. In 1954 the Dutch archaeologist C. C. Van Essen published
the results of careful probing in the whole section of Rome for half a
mile around the Coliseum, where he found traces of Nero's palace in a
number of places on the perimeter. For the Golden House was much more
than the complex of rooms just described. It was a gigantic system
(Fig. 7.13) of parks, with lawns, groves, pastures, a zoo. Over its

central pool later rose the great bulk of the Coliseum. Within these
grounds, twice the extent of Vatican City, was a great Versailles in
the midst of the teeming metropolis. The eighty-odd rooms we have been
describing made up but one of several palaces in the grounds. And an
American, Miss E. B. Van Deman, working from some very unlikely-looking
architectural blocks piled beside the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina
in the old Forum, was able in 1925 to restore on paper (Fig. 7.14)
the monumental approach, over 350 feet wide, to the palace grounds
from the old Forum and Palatine. It was a mile long, with arcades of
luxury shops, and eight rows of pillars. Its plan is concealed today
under mounds of dumped earth between the Hall of the Vestals and the
Arch of Titus. Beside it rose a colossal statue of Nero, 120 feet
tall, now marked by a pattern in the pavement. When Hadrian desired
to remove the statue to make room for his Temple of Venus and Rome,
it took twenty-four elephants to do the job. But decades before, his
predecessors the Flavians had done what they could, with the Baths of
Titus and the Flavian Amphitheater (the proper name of the Coliseum) to
erase the memory of Nero's monstrous extravagance, and turn his palace
grounds to public use.

it it it it it

The four archaeological examples from the Julio-Claudian age discussed
in this chapter were chosen for their intrinsic interest, not to
illustrate a thesis. But they do prove a point all the same. Tiberius'

_al fresco_ dining room, with its monstrous and tortured statuary
(even though some of it be later in date); Caligula's houseboats, with
their incredibly heavy profusion of work in colored marble, mosaic,
and bronze; Nero's Golden House, with its labyrinth of gaudy and
over-decorated rooms of state, all testify to a decadent extravagance
beyond Hollywood's wildest aspirations. By comparison, the cool, quiet
taste of the subterranean basilica is an oasis and a relief, but even
this is a commentary on Claudius' intolerance. And it has about it an
air of holier-than-thou Brahminism, the furthest possible contrast
with the warmth, the close contact with common people, which marked
the Christianity that was to be preached in Rome not long after the
basilica-sect was outlawed. One cannot but marvel at the staying-power
of the organism that could survive this prodigality, this cleavage
between class and mass, for over three centuries. But as we focus our
attention upon the excesses of court and of metropolis, we ought not to
forget that in the municipal towns of Italy and the Empire life went
on, more modestly, quietly, and decently. Archaeology gives us precious
proof of this in a pair of buried cities of the Flavian Age, Pompeii
and Herculaneum.

WERE INDIANS AFRAID OF YELLOWSTONE?

Project Gutenberg's The Story of Man In Yellowstone, by Merrill Dee Beal

Beginning with the origin of Yellowstone as a National Park the idea
became current that Indians were afraid of the area. The opinion is
still widely held that they considered it a cursed domain, unfit for
habitation. While it is true that superstition and taboo loomed large in
primitive experience, there is no reason to suppose that Indians gave
Wonderland a wide berth. [87] Rather, there is an abundance of material
evidence that controverts this view. Furthermore, the proposition is at
once illogical and untrue historically.

How, then, did this fiction originate? Probably the major reason is
found in the fact that, with the exception of a small band of
recluse-like Tukuarikas, or Sheepeaters, Indians did not live
permanently in Yellowstone. This fact alone suggests that the region was
not regarded as an appropriate abode. Only a pygmy tribe of about four
hundred timid souls deemed it a suitable homeland.

These people were the weakest of all mountain clans. They did not
possess horses. Their tools were of the crudest type; they lived in
caves and nearly inaccessible niches in cliffs along the Gardner River,
especially in wintertime. These more permanent camps were carefully
chosen in the interest of security against other Indians. Superintendent
Norris discovered one of them by accident:

In trailing a wounded bighorn I descended a rocky dangerous pathway.

In rapt astonishment I found I had thus unbidden entered an ancient
but recently deserted, secluded, unknown haunt of the Sheepeater
aborigines of the Park. [88]

This campground was a half mile in length and four hundred feet at its
widest point, with a similar depth, "and hemmed in and hidden by rugged
timber-fringed basaltic cliffs...."

In summer, the Sheepeater Indians ventured further into the interior,
following the game upon the higher plateaus. There they erected:

skin-covered lodges, or circular upright brush-heaps called wickiups,
decaying evidences of which are abundant near Mammoth Hot Springs, the
various firehole basins, the shores of Yellowstone Lake, the newly
explored Hoodoo regions, and in nearly all of the sheltered glens and
valleys of the Park. [89]

In 1874, the Earl of Dunraven discovered such a camp just west of Mary
Mountain on the head of Nez Perce Creek.

Superintendent Norris and his associates focused their eyes particularly
upon evidences of Indian occupancy. In a dozen places they observed rude
but extensive pole and brush fences used for wild animal driveways. [90]
An especially strategic camp was discovered near the summit of a grassy
pass between Hoodoo and Miller creeks. From this skyline perch, marked
by forty decaying lodges, an entire tribe could command a view of all
possible approaches for many miles. Fragments of white men's chinaware,
blankets, bed clothing, and male and female wearing apparel bore mute
but mournful witness of border raids and massacres. This was an Absaroka
summer retreat.

However, there are few such evidences discernible today because snows
are heavy and wind fallen trees profuse, while the character of Indian
structures was flimsy. In fact, these Indians, on the whole, left fewer
enduring signs of their dwelling places than beaver. Several log
wickiups still stand in a pleasant fir grove in the triangle formed by
Fava Creek and Gardner River above their point of union. These wickiups
are readily accessible from the Tower Falls highway one half mile east
of the Gardner River bridge.

What happened to the timid Tukuarikas? They simply vanished from the
scene as the white men invaded their refuge. They left without a contest
for ownership or treaty of cession. That is the way most Americans would
have had all Indian tribes behave!

All mountain Indian tribes visited Yellowstone. We-Saw, Shoshoni guide
for Captain W. A. Jones in 1873, said his people and also the Bannocks
and Crows occasionally visited the Yellowstone River and Fake.

For one thing, Obsidian Cliff had the effect of a magnet upon them. It
was their arsenal, a lance and arrowhead quarry. Arrowheads and spears
originating here have been found in an area extending many miles in
every direction. The obsidian chips, from which implements were
assiduously shaped by the Indians, still litter the side hills and
ravines in chosen areas all over the Park. Many fine specimens of
arrowheads, knives, scrapers, and spears have been found at various
places. The most notable finds have been around the base of Mt. Holmes,
along Indian Creek, at Fishing Bridge, near West Thumb, in the Norris
and Fower Geyser basins, and about the Famar Valley. Actually, these
artifacts have generally turned up wherever excavation for modern camps
has been made.

In P. W. Norris' _Fifth Annual Report, 1881_, there is a comprehensive
analysis of the problem of Indian occupancy. Diagrams of four steatite
vessels found in widely separated places are represented. Drawings of
arrowheads and sinkers also occur, and figures 10 to 24, inclusive,
depict the natural sizes of scrapers, knives, lance, spearheads, and
perforators, mostly chipped from Park obsidian. [91] These artifacts were
found in various places, such as caverns, driveways, at the foot of
cliffs, and along creeks. Said Norris: "Over two hundred such specimens
were collected this season." [92]

In his report of 1878, Mr. Norris states: "Chips, flakes, arrowheads and
other Indian tools and weapons have been found by all recent tourists in
burial cairns and also scattered broadcast in all these mountain
valleys." [93]

Is it any wonder Indian artifacts are scarce in Yellowstone today?

Still, they are frequently found when excavations are made. Winter
snows, animal trampings, land slides, and floods have covered them. A
few isolated items of discovery should be noted: arrowheads have
recently been found on Stevenson Island, in lake gravel pits, about
Buffalo Ranch, in the sewer line, near South Entrance, on the Game
Ranch, around Norris, Lower, and Midway geyser basins, and at Fishing
Bridge. [94]

Another evidence of Indian visitation was evinced by a network of
trails. One of these followed the Yellowstone Valley across the Park
from north to south. It divided at Yellowstone Lake, the principal
branch adhering to the east shore and leading to Two Ocean Pass where it
intersected the great Snake and Wind River trail. Since Indian trails
multisected the Yellowstone area it is obvious that the region was a
sort of no-man's land. Undesirable as a homeland, it was used as a
summer retreat by many Rocky Mountain tribes. From this circumstance it
may be assumed that an autumn seldom passed without a clash between the
Bannocks and the Crows or the Shoshonis. Surely, the shrill notes of
Blackfeet warwhoops have echoed in these vales. Campsites were well
chosen both from the viewpoint of preserving secrecy and desirability as
watchtower sites.

The most important trail, however, was that known as the Great Bannock
Trail. The Bannocks of southeastern Idaho made an annual trek to the
Bighorn Basin for buffalo. Their trail followed Henrys Fork of Snake
River to Henrys Lake, an ancient Bannock rendezvous. From this notable
camp the trail went up Howard Creek and crossed the Continental Divide

at Targhee Pass. Upon reaching the Upper Madison Valley, the route
passed Horse Butte and angled north of West Yellowstone townsite. A camp
at Great Springs (now Cory Springs) was situated near the Park boundary.

In Yellowstone National Park, the Bannock Trail winds its devious way
across the northern part. There are a half-dozen deviations from the
main artery. Wayne Replogle suggests that weather conditions determined
these alternations. High ground would be chosen enroute to the plains,
but the return trip could be made along the streams. Other
considerations might include security, grazing, and game. Entering the
Park upon Duck Creek the Trail swung northward across Campanula Creek,
paralleled Gneiss Creek to the point of crossing, then quartered
southward, crossing Maple Creek and Duck Creek, on toward the head of
Cougar Creek and its ample pasture lands.

From this area the Trail goes almost due north to White Peaks, which are
skirted on the West. The Gallatin Range was crossed via a saddle north
of White Peaks. The Trail then dropped upon the headwaters of Indian
Creek and followed down to Gardner River. The route then looped to the
left, across Swan Lake flats, on through Snow Pass, down the decline to
Mammoth Hot Springs. From Mammoth the Indian thoroughfare struck right,
recrossed Gardner River, and followed Lava Creek toward Tower Fall.

The Yellowstone River ford was located just above Tower Fall, near the
mouth of Tower Creek. Vestiges of the trail may still be discerned along
both banks of Yellowstone River. Other evidences, such as deep
grass-sodded furrows, may be seen in the vicinity of junction of the
Lamar River and Soda Butte Creek. One branch paralleled Soda Butte Creek
to the divide and then descended Clarks Fork to the bison range. The
alternate route continued along the Lamar to a secondary divide between
Cache and Calfee creeks. This hog's back was then followed to the
summit, and the descent was down Timber Creek to its confluence with
Clarks Fork. The deep ruts worn by travois in these pilgrimages are
still obvious in many places, although unused for three quarters of a
century.

Can anyone doubt that the Bannocks made frequent and extensive
excursions beyond this thoroughfare? Surely their young men ranged far
and wide, prying into every nook and cranny of Wonderland. They
undoubtedly fished in the great lake and river, hunted elk and bighorn,
bathed in warm springs, and reveled in the beauties of the landscape.

Any other view of the evidence would impute undue naivete to human
nature. After all, Indians were children of nature; the earth was their
mother. In Yellowstone Mother Earth was especially intriguing. They
might not understand her; they might entertain great respect for her

strange manifestations, but cringing trepidation? Hardly! But weren't
they afraid of the geysers? In 1935, White Hawk and Many Wounds visited
the Park. They were members of Chief Joseph's band when it crossed the
Park in 1877. When asked if the Nez Perce Indians were afraid of the
geysers and hot springs they said no and implied that they used them in
cooking. [95] Still the critic objects, saying the geyser and spring
formations were all intact when the first white men came. Primitive
people were seldom guilty of wanton spoliation. Hence, missing
incrustations were not essential evidence of Indian visitation. They
left nature's beauty as they found it, a proper example for all who
might follow after.

Did Indians ever hear the legendary overhead sounds in the vicinity of
Shoshone and Yellowstone lakes —those strange half-minute tunes like the
humming of bees or echo of bells?[96] Perhaps they did. Any phenomenon
audible to white men with the naked ear would be discernible to them
because they were sensitive to nature and her communion was always
welcomed. However, since Indians were without records and formal
procedures for obtaining and preserving scientific knowledge they were
tremendously limited in understanding. They operated upon a single
dimension of experience. For instance, they could never realize that the
fish they took from Lake Yellowstone was a Pacific Ocean species which
could only have reached these inland lakes via the Snake River system,
signifying that, in ages past, the great lake must have possessed an
outlet in that direction. All such problems awaited the scientists, but
red men still knew much in their own right.

Surely then, Indians were summertime visitors in Yellowstone. They
literally swarmed around the lakes. The most unimpeachable testimony on
this point comes from trapper accounts of actual encounters. This phase
of the case is discussed in the following chapter. Their known presence
in the wooded area was the greatest deterrent to the white man's
interest. Few men voluntarily risk their lives for a view of nature's
wonders. It is a historical fact that the Washburn-Langford-Doane party
saw Crow Indians along the north environs of the Park and actually
followed a fresh line of tracks into the Yellowstone area. Thus the
scenic exploitation of Wonderland was not feasible until the Indians
were rounded up and confined to the reservations. This program was
accomplished in the states surrounding Yellowstone between 1860 and
1877.

This process of racial adjustment was not accomplished without minor
repercussions upon Yellowstone. The exciting Nez Perce flight of 1877 is
considered separately in Chapter XI. However, the very next year the
Bannocks conducted an impressive horse-stealing foray against the

property of laborers and tourists. These episodes resulted in
unfavorable publicity from the standpoint of tourist interest in
visiting Wonderland. In consequence two important steps were taken by
the officials. In 1880 Superintendent Norris made a tour of all the
Rocky Mountain Indian reservations. His mission was to secure solemn
promises from the tribes to abide by the terms of their Washington
treaties and in particular to stay away from the Park. [97]

These agreements were widely advertised, and in order to further
neutralize any fear of Indian trouble a policy of minimizing past
incidents was evolved. The recent invasions were represented as
unprecedented, actually anomalous. Indians had never lived in
Yellowstone, were infrequent visitors because they were afraid of the
thermal activity! It was not a conspiracy against truth, just an
adaptation of business psychology to a promising national resort.

JUNE 24,1938

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Our government, happily, is a democracy. As part of the democratic
process, your President is again taking an opportunity to report on
the progress of national affairs, to report to the real rulers of
this country—the voting public.

The Seventy-Fifth Congress, elected in November, 1936, on a
platform uncompromisingly liberal, has adjourned. Barring
unforeseen events, there will be no session until the new Congress,
to be elected in November, assembles next January.

On the one hand, the Seventy-Fifth Congress has left many things
undone.

For example, it refused to provide more businesslike machinery for
running the Executive Branch of the government. The Congress also
failed to meet my suggestion that it take the far-reaching steps
necessary to put the railroads of the country back on their feet.

But, on the other hand, the Congress, striving to carry out the
platform on which most of its members were elected, achieved more
for the future good of the country than any Congress did between
the end of the World War and the spring of 1933.

I mention tonight only the more important of these achievements.

(1) It improved still further our agricultural laws to give the
farmer a fairer share of the national income, to preserve our soil,
to provide an all-weather granary, to help the farm tenant towards
independence, to find new uses for farm products, and to begin crop
insurance.

(2) After many requests on my part the Congress passed a Fair Labor
Standards Act, commonly called the Wages and Hours Bill. That act-
applying to products in interstate commerce—ends child labor, sets

a floor below wages and a ceiling over hours of labor.

Except perhaps for the Social Security Act, it is the most far-
reaching, the most far-sighted program for the benefit of workers
ever adopted here or in any other country. Without question it
starts us toward a better standard of living and increases
purchasing power to buy the products of farm and factory.

Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000
a day, who has been turning his employees over to the government
relief rolls in order to preserve his company's undistributed
reserves, tell you—using his stockholders' money to pay the
postage for his personal opinions—that a wage of $11 a week is
going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry.
Fortunately for business as a whole, and therefore for the nation,
that type of executive is a rarity with whom most business
executives most heartily disagree.

(3) The Congress has provided a fact-finding Commission to find a
path through the jungle of contradictory theories about the wise
business practices—to find the necessary facts for any intelligent
legislation on monopoly, on price-fixing and on the relationship
between big business and medium-sized business and little business.
Different from a great part of the world, we in America persist in
our belief in individual enterprise and in the profit motive; but

we realize we must continually seek improved practices to insure
the continuance of reasonable profits, together with scientific
progress, individual initiative, opportunities for the little
fellow, fair prices, decent wages and continuing employment.

(4) The Congress has coordinated the supervision of commercial
aviation and air mail by establishing a new Civil Aeronautics
Authority; and it has placed all postmasters under the civil
service for the first time in our national history.

(5) The Congress set up the United States Housing Authority to help
finance large-scale slum clearance and provide low rent housing for
the low income groups in our cities. And by improving the Federal
Housing Act, the Congress made it easier for private capital to
build modest homes and low rental dwellings.

(6) The Congress has properly reduced taxes on small corporate
enterprises, and has made it easier for the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation to make credit available to all business. I think the
bankers of the country can fairly be expected to participate in
loans where the government, through the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation, offers to take a fair portion of the risk.

(7) The Congress has provided additional funds for the Works
Progress Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Rural
Electrification Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps and
other agencies, in order to take care of what we hope is a
temporary additional number of unemployed at this time and to
encourage production of every kind by private enterprise.

All these things together I call our program for the national
defense of our economic system. It is a program of balanced
action—of moving on all fronts at once in intelligent recognition
that all of our economic problems, of every group, and of every
section of the country are essentially one problem.

(8) Finally, because of increasing armaments in other nations and
an international situation which is definitely disturbing to all of
us, the Congress has authorized important additions to the national
armed defense of our shores and our people.

On another important subject the net result of a struggle in the
Congress has been an important victory for the people of the United
States—what might well be called a lost battle which won a war.

You will remember that on February 5,1937,1 sent a message to the
Congress dealing with the real need of federal court reforms of
several kinds. In one way or another, during the sessions of this
Congress, the ends—the real objectives—sought in that message,
have been substantially attained.

The attitude of the Supreme Court towards constitutional questions
is entirely changed. Its recent decisions are eloquent testimony of
a willingness to collaborate with the two other branches of
government to make democracy work. The government has been granted

the right to protect its interests in litigation between private
parties involving the constitutionality of federal, and to appeal
directly to the Supreme Court in all cases involving the
constitutionality of federal statutes; and no single judge is any
longer empowered to suspend a federal statute on his sole judgment
as to its constitutionality. Justices of the Supreme Court may now
retire at the age of seventy after ten years of service; a
substantial number of additional judgeships have been created in
order to expedite the trial of cases; and finally greater
flexibility has been added to the federal judicial system by
allowing judges to be assigned to congested districts.

Another indirect accomplishment of this Congress has been its
response to the devotion of the American people to a course of sane
and consistent liberalism. The Congress has understood that under
modern conditions government has a continuing responsibility to
meet continuing problems, and that government cannot take a holiday
of a year, or a month, or even a day just because a few people are
tired or frightened by the inescapable pace, fast pace, of this
modern world in which we live.

Some of my opponents and some of my associates have considered that
I have a mistakenly sentimental judgment as to the tenacity of
purpose and the general level of intelligence of the American
people.

I am still convinced that the American people, since 1932, continue
to insist on two requisites of private enterprise, and the
relationship of government to it. The first is a complete honesty
at the top in looking after the use of other people's money, and in
apportioning and paying individual and corporate taxes according to
ability to pay. The second is sincere respect for the need of all
people who are at the bottom, all people at the bottom who need to
get work—and through work to get a really fair share of the good
things of life, and a chance to save and rise.

After the election of 1936 I was told, and the Congress was told,
by an increasing number of politically—and worldly-wise people
that I should coast along, enjoy an easy Presidency for four years,
and not take the Democratic platform too seriously. They told me
that people were getting weary of reform through political effort
and would no longer oppose that small minority which, in spite of
its own disastrous leadership in 1929, is always eager to resume
its control over the government of the United States.

Never in our lifetime has such a concerted campaign of defeatism
been thrown at the heads of the President and the Senators and
Congressmen as in the case of this Seventy-Fifth Congress. Never
before have we had so many Copperheads—and you will remember that
it was the Copperheads who, in the days of the War between the
States, tried their best to make President Lincoln and his Congress
give up the fight, let the nation remain split in two and return to
peace—peace at any price.

This Congress has ended on the side of the people. My faith in the
American people—and their faith in themselves—have been
justified. I congratulate the Congress and the leadership thereof
and I congratulate the American people on their own staying power.

One word about our economic situation. It makes no difference to me
whether you call it a recession or a depression. In 1932 the total
national income of all the people in the country had reached the
low point of thirty-eight billion dollars in that year. With each
succeeding year it rose. Last year, 1937, it had risen to seventy
billion dollars—despite definitely worse business and agricultural
prices in the last four months of last year. This year, 1938, while
it is too early to do more than give an estimate, we hope that the
national income will not fall below sixty billion dollars. We
remember also that banking and business and farming are not falling
apart like the one-hoss shay, as they did in the terrible winter of
1932-1933.

Last year mistakes were made by the leaders of private enterprise,
by the leaders of labor and by the leaders of government—all
three.

Last year the leaders of private enterprise pleaded for a sudden
curtailment of public spending, and said they would take up the
slack. But they made the mistake of increasing their inventories
too fast and setting many of their prices too high for their goods
to sell.

Some labor leaders goaded by decades of oppression of labor made
the mistake of going too far. They were not wise in using methods
which frightened many well-wishing people. They asked employers not
only to bargain with them but to put up with jurisdictional
disputes at the same time.

Government too made mistakes—mistakes of optimism in assuming that
industry and labor would themselves make no mistakes—and

government made a mistake of timing in not passing a farm bill or a
wage and hour bill last year.

As a result of the lessons of all these mistakes we hope that in
the future private enterprise—capital and labor alike—will
operate more intelligently together, and operate in greater
cooperation with their own government than they have in the past.
Such cooperation on the part of both of them will be very welcome
to me. Certainly at this stage there should be a united stand on
the part of both of them to resist wage cuts which would further
reduce purchasing power.

Today a great steel company announced a reduction in prices with a
view to stimulating business recovery, and I was gratified to know
that this reduction involved no wage cut. Every encouragement ought
to be given to industry which accepts the large volume and high
wage policy.

If this is done, it ought to result in conditions which will
replace a great part of the government spending which the failure
of cooperation has made necessary this year.

From March 4,1933 down, not a single week has passed without a cry
from the opposition, a small opposition, a cry "to do something, to
say something, to restore confidence." There is a very articulate
group of people in this country, with plenty of ability to procure
publicity for their views, who have consistently refused to
cooperate with the mass of the people, whether things were going
well or going badly, on the ground that they required more
concessions to their point of view before they would admit having
what they called "confidence."

These people demanded "restoration of confidence" when the banks
were closed—and demanded it again when the banks were reopened.

They demanded "restoration of confidence" when hungry people were
thronging the streets—and again when the hungry people were fed
and put to work.

They demanded "restoration of confidence" when droughts hit the
country—and again now when our fields are laden with bounteous
yields and excessive crops.

They demanded "restoration of confidence" last year when the
automobile industry was running three shifts and turning out more

cars than the country could buy—and again this year when the
industry is trying to get rid of an automobile surplus and has shut
down its factories as a result.

It is my belief that many of these people who have been crying
aloud for "confidence" are beginning today to realize that that
hand has been overplayed, and that they are now willing to talk
cooperation instead. It is my belief that the mass of the American
people do have confidence in themselves—have confidence in their
ability, with the aid of government, to solve their own problems.

It is because you are not satisfied, and I am not satisfied, with
the progress that we have made in finally solving our business and
agricultural and social problems that I believe the great majority
of you want your own government to keep on trying to solve them. In
simple frankness and in simple honesty, I need all the help I can
get—and I see signs of getting more help in the future from many
who have fought against progress with tooth and nail.

And now following out this line of thought, I want to say a few
words about the coming political primaries.

Fifty years ago party nominations were generally made in
conventions—a system typified in the public imagination by a
little group in a smoke-filled room who made out the party slates.

The direct primary was invented to make the nominating process a
more democratic one—to give the party voters themselves a chance
to pick their party candidates.

What I am going to say to you tonight does not relate to the
primaries of any particular political party, but to matters of
principle in all parties—Democratic, Republican, Farmer-Labor,
Progressive, Socialist or any other. Let that be clearly
understood.

It is my hope that everybody affiliated with any party will vote in
the primaries, and that every such voter will consider the
fundamental principles for which his or her party is on record.

That makes for a healthy choice between the candidates of the
opposing parties on Election Day in November.

An election cannot give the country a firm sense of direction if it
has two or more national parties which merely have different names
but are as alike in their principles and aims as peas in the same

pod.

In the coming primaries in all parties, there will be many clashes
between two schools of thought, generally classified as liberal and
conservative. Roughly speaking, the liberal school of thought
recognizes that the new conditions throughout the world call for
new remedies.

Those of us in America who hold to this school of thought, insist
that these new remedies can be adopted and successfully maintained
in this country under our present form of government if we use
government as an instrument of cooperation to provide these
remedies. We believe that we can solve our problems through
continuing effort, through democratic processes instead of Fascism
or Communism. We are opposed to the kind of moratorium on reform
which, in effect, is reaction itself.

Be it clearly understood, however, that when I use the word
"liberal," I mean the believer in progressive principles of
democratic, representative government and not the wild man who, in
effect, leans in the direction of Communism, for that is just as
dangerous as Fascism itself.

The opposing or conservative school of thought, as a general
proposition, does not recognize the need for government itself to
step in and take action to meet these new problems. It believes
that individual initiative and private philanthropy will solve
them—that we ought to repeal many of the things we have done and
go back, for instance, to the old gold standard, or stop all this
business of old age pensions and unemployment insurance, or repeal
the Securities and Exchange Act, or let monopolies thrive
unchecked—return, in effect, to the kind of government that we had
in the twenties.

Assuming the mental capacity of all the candidates, the important
question which it seems to me the primary voter must ask is this:

"To which of these general schools of thought does the candidate
belong?"

As President of the United States, I am not asking the voters of
the country to vote for Democrats next November as opposed to
Republicans or members of any other party. Nor am I, as President,
taking part in Democratic primaries.

As the head of the Democratic Party, however, charged with the

responsibility of carrying out the definitely liberal declaration
of principles set forth in the 1936 Democratic platform, I feel
that I have every right to speak in those few instances where there
may be a clear-cut issue between candidates for a Democratic
nomination involving these principles, or involving a clear misuse
of my own name.

Do not misunderstand me. I certainly would not indicate a
preference in a state primary merely because a candidate, otherwise
liberal in outlook, had conscientiously differed with me on any
single issue. I should be far more concerned about the general
attitude of a candidate towards present day problems and his own
inward desire to get practical needs attended to in a practical
way. We all know that progress may be blocked by outspoken
reactionaries, and also by those who say "yes" to a progressive
objective, but who always find some reason to oppose any special
specific proposal to gain that objective. I call that type of
candidate a "yes, but" fellow.

And I am concerned about the attitude of a candidate or his
sponsors with respect to the rights of American citizens to
assemble peaceably and to express publicly their views and opinions
on important social and economic issues. There can be no
constitutional democracy in any community which denies to the
individual his freedom to speak and worship as he wishes. The
American people will not be deceived by anyone who attempts to
suppress individual liberty under the pretense of patriotism.

This being a free country with freedom of expression—especially
with freedom of the press—there will be a lot of mean blows struck
between now and Election Day. By "blows" I mean misrepresentation,
personal attack and appeals to prejudice. It would be a lot better,
of course, if campaigns everywhere could be waged with arguments
instead of with blows.

I hope the liberal candidates will confine themselves to argument
and not resort to blows. In nine cases out of ten the speaker or
the writer who, seeking to influence public opinion, descends from
calm argument to unfair blows hurts himself more than his opponent.

The Chinese have a story on this—a story based on three or four
thousand years of civilization: Two Chinese coolies were arguing
heatedly in the midst of a crowd. A stranger expressed surprise
that no blows were being struck. His Chinese friend replied: "The
man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out."

I know that neither in the summer primaries nor in the November
elections will the American voters fail to spot the candidate whose
ideas have given out.

ON TEACHING ONE'S GRANDMOTHER HOW TO SUCK EGGS

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Patrins, by Louise Imogen Guiney
1885.

IN the days of the Schoolmen, when no vexed question went without
its fair showing, it seems incredible that the important thesis
hereto affixed as a title went a-begging among those hair-splitting
philosophers. Since Aristotle himself overlooked it, Duns Scotus
and the noted Paracelsus, Aureolus Philip Theophrastus Bombast de
Hohenheim himself, were content to repeat his sin of omission. Even
Sir Thomas Browne, "the horizon of whose understanding was much
larger than the hemisphere of this world," neither unearthed the
origin of this singular implied practice, nor attempted in any way
to uphold or depreciate it. The phrase hath scarce the grace of an
Oriental precept, and scarce the dignity of Rome. It might sooner
appertain to Sparta, where the old were held in reverence, and where
their education, in a burst of filial anxiety, might be prolonged
beyond the usual term of mental receptivity.

It is reserved therefore, for some modern inquirer to establish,
whether the strange accomplishment in mind was at any time, in any
nation, barbarous or enlightened, in universal repute among venerable
females; or else especially imparted, under the rose, as a sort of
witch-trick, to conjurers, fortune-tellers, pythonesses, sibyls, and
such secretive and oracular folk; whether the initiatory lessons were
theoretical merely; and at what age the grandams (for the condition
of hypermaternity was at least imperative) were allowed to begin
operations.

It is a partial argument against the antiquity of the custom, and
against the supposition of its having prevailed among old Europe's
nomadic tribes, that several of these are accused by historians of
having destroyed their progenitors so soon as the latter became idle
and enfeebled: whereas it is reasonably to be inferred that the
gentle process of ovisugescence, had such then been invented, would
have kept the savage fireside peopled with happy and industrious
centenarians. After the arduous labor of their long lives, this
new, leisurely, mild, and genteel trade could be acquired with

imperceptible trouble. Cato mastering Greek at eighty, Dandolo
leading hosts when past his October, are kittenish and irreverend
figures beside that of a toothless Goth grandmother, learning, with
melancholy energy, to suck eggs.

We know not why the privilege of education, if granted to them
without question, should have been withheld from their gray spouses,
who certainly would have preferred so sociable an industry to
whetting the knives of the hunters, or tending watch-fires by night.

But no one of us ever heard of a grandfather sucking eggs. The gentle
art was apparently sacred to the gentle sex, and withheld from the
shaggy lords of creation, by whom the innutritious properties of the
shell were happily unsuspected.

By what means was the race of hens, for instance, preserved?

Statistics might be proffered concerning the ante-natal consumption
of fledglings, which would edify students of natural history.

One bitterly-disputed point, the noble adage under consideration
permanently settles; a quibble which ought to have

"staggered that stout Stagyrite,"

and which has come even to the notice of grave inductive theologians:
_videlicet_, that the bird, and not the egg, may claim the priority
of existence. For had it been otherwise, one's grandmother would
been early acquainted with the very article which her posterity
recommended to her as a novelty, and which, with respectful care,
they taught her to utilize, after a fashion best adapted to her time
of life.

Fallen into desuetude is this judicious and salutary custom. There
must have been a time when a yellowish stain about the mouth denoted
an age, a vocation, a limitation, effectually as did the bulla of the
lad, the maiden's girdle, "the marshal's truncheon, or the judge's
robe," or any of the picturesque distinctions now crushed out of
the social code. But the orthodox sucking of eggs, the innocent,
austere, meditative pastime, is no more, and the glory of grandams is
extinguished forever.

The dreadful civility of our western woodsmen, the popular
dissentient voice alike of the theatre and of the political
meeting,—the casting of eggs wherefrom the element of youth is
wholly eliminated, affords a speculation on heredity, and appears to
be a faint echo of some traditional squabble in the morning of the
world, among disagreeing kinswomen; the very primordial battle, where

reloading was superfluous, where every shell told, whose blackest
spite was spent in a golden rain and hail. What havoc over the face
of young creation; what coloring of pools, and of errant butterflies!

What distress amid the cleanly pixies and dryads, whose shady haunts
trickled unwelcome moisture: a terror not unshared in the recesses of
the coast:—

"_Intus aquae dulces, vivoque sedilia saxo,

Nympharum domus._"

One can fancy the younglings of the vast human family, the success
of whose lesson to their elders was thus over-well demonstrated,
marking the ebb and flow of hostilities, like the superb spirits
of Richelieu and the fourteenth Louis, eyeing the great Revolution.

What marvel, if, struck with remorse at the senile strife of the
"she-citizens," they vowed never, never to teach another grandmother
to suck eggs! So it was, maybe, that the abused custom was lost from
the earth.

Nay, more; its remembrance is perverted into a taunt more scorching
than lightning, more silencing than the bolt of Jove. _Sus
Minervam_ is Cicero's elegant equivalent; and Partridge says to Tom
Jones, quoting his old schoolmaster: "Polly Matete cry town is my
daskalon": the English whereof runneth: Teach your grandmother how
to suck eggs! Is not the phrase the cream of scorn, the catchword
of insubordination, the blazing defiance of tongues unbroken as a
one-year's colt? It grated strangely on our ear. We grieved over the
transformation of a favorite saw, innocuous once, and conveying a
meek educational suggestion. We came to admit that the Academe where
the old sat at the feet of their descendants, to be ingratiated into
the most amiable of professions, was nothing better, in memory, than
an impertinence. And we sadly avowed, in the underground chamber of
our private heart, that, as for worldly prospects, it would be fairly
suicidal, all things considered, to aspire now to the chair of that
professorship.

Let some reformer, who cherishes his ancestress, and who is not
averse to break his fast on an omelet, dissuade either object of
his regard from longer lending name and countenance to a vulgar
sneer. Shall such be thy mission, reader? We would wish the extended
acquaintance with that mysterious small cosmos which suggests to the
liberal palate broiled wing and giblets _in posse_j and joy for many
a year of thy parent's parent, who is in some sort thy reference and
means of identification, the hub of thy far-reaching and more active
life; but, prithee, wrench apart their sorry association in our

English speech. Purists shall forgive thee if thou shalt, meanwhile,
smile in thy sleeve at the fantastic text which brought them together.

PD Non-Fiction is a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Copyrighted Project by Matt Pierard, 2019